Ana Maria Spagna in Conversation With Michelle Nijhuis

Ana Maria Spagna’s new collection, Coiled: Essays on Urgency and Kinship (Bison Books), covers eight years of unrest, personal and communal, beginning with stubborn patriotic certainty, a faith in neighborliness and American ideals, and ending with something broader: an alliance with the matriarch, Mother Nature, and the ways she elides ideology or definition.

The essays shift perspective to focus on subjects too often overlooked: unwritten histories of xenophobia in the American West, the rights of rivers everywhere, queerness in middle age, troubled human kin, and our more-than-human kin — snakes, fish, bears, sea lions, and a beloved robotic cat. These essays balance wonder at the world around us and urgency at the threats to it, but they add one more imperative: to focus on kinship — on the people we care for and those who care for us, and the more-than-human too.

Spagna will be joined in conversation by Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts.