What: An author event with Tyler J. Kelley, in conversation with Anna Monardo
When: Saturday, May 22nd at 1:00 p.m. CDT
Where: Virtual, via Zoom. Event access available here.
About: Tyler J. Kelley will discuss his recent release, Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America's Waterways, with UNO Writer's Workshop professor, Anna Monardo. Holding Back the River is a revelatory work of reporting on the men and women wrestling to harness and preserve America's most vital natural resource: our rivers.
The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America's great rivers are the very lifeblood of our country. We need them for nourishing crops, for cheap bulk transportation, for hydroelectric power, for fresh drinking water. Rivers are also part of our mythology, our collective soul; they are Mark Twain, Led Zeppelin, and the Delta Blues. But as infrastructure across the nation fails and climate change pushes rivers and seas to new heights, we've arrived at a critical moment in our battle to tame these often-destructive forces of nature. Tyler J. Kelley spent two years traveling the heartland, getting to know the men and women whose lives and livelihoods rely on these tenuously tamed streams. The result, Holding Back the River, is a deeply human exploration of how our centuries-long dream of conquering and shaping this vast network of waterways squares with the reality of an indomitable natural world.
Tyler J. Kelley is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker among other publications. Kelley currently teaches at The New School in the Journalism + Design program. His previous projects include the documentary film Following Seas, codirected with his wife Araby Kelley. They live with their son in Brooklyn.
Anna Monardo is a Writer's Workshop professor at UNO and the author of two books. Her first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams, was translated into German, Norwegian and Danish, and was nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award and recommended for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Monardo’s stories, essays and poems have been anthologized, featured on National Public Radio, and published or are forthcoming in The Sun, More, Salon.com, Huffington Post, Poets & Writers, Indiana Review, Redbook and other magazines and journals.
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