Jolene Brink, Krissy Kludt and Anna Zumbahlen

Celebrating three debut poetry collections.

All three of these collections address pressing questions of our time. What does it mean to love a place? How do we write honestly about connection with the land in our time of present and impending ecological disaster? Across multiple landscapes— Iowa, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin — these books, together, reveal the reality of ecological grief in deeply personal ways, offering such solace as comes from intimacy with the wild world.

Poet Krissy Kludt is the founder and executive director of Writing the Wild. Her debut poetry collection I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little released in March 2026 from Green Writers Press. Her work appears in anthologies The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025), Taking Liberties (Cutthroat 2025), and Stories from the Trail (Wayfarer Books 2024), and in other publications, including Terrain.org, The Wildness We Tend, and Humana Obscura. She lives in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.

Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Southern California. She holds a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship. Read recent work at www.annazum.com.

Jolene Brink was born and raised in northern Minnesota. She received the Merriam-Frontier Award for her chapbook, Peregrine, and the Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry award for her poetry collection, Overburden. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Orion, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She works for the University of Minnesota and lives with her family in a historic blue house near the St. Croix River.

This event is free and open to the public.