Along the Road Everyone Must Travel
The poet will be joined by colleague Leia Penina Wilson
Selected by Hoa Nguyen as the winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, Along the Road Everyone Must Travel is set in the topsoil above the underworld, at the foot of empire. Pafunda’s tenth book of poems takes place during a spring super-bloom, a colony collapse, an end-time. It’s a lanky, muscular meditation on belonging–as both property and beloved. Pacing the road from desert to sea, unraveling gender from violence from capital, asking what happens when we finally refuse to dog-eat-dog our way through, this queer surrealist epic leaps from the Homeric hymns to post-punk lyrics, holding its tender friends, calling out its loves to play, slick with sex, illness, loss, and wonder.
Danielle Pafunda is the author of ten books including Along the Road Everyone Must Travel selected by Hoa Nguyen as the winner of the 2023 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, Spite (The Operating System), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), and The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), translated into Spanish by the writer Cristina Rivera Garza as Las Chicas Muertas Hablan al Unísono (Dharma Books). Other work appears in American Poetry Review, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, Conjunctions, the Texas Review, and others. Pafunda teaches creative writing, literature, queer and gender studies, and worldbuilding at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Leia Penina Wilson is a queer Samoan poet, weaver, and educator whose most recent book is Call the Necromancer (Action Books 2026). She is also author of This Red Metropolis, What Remains, Splinters are Children of Wood winner of the University of Notre Dame Press Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, and i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) winner of the Red Hed Press 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. They teach creative writing and worldbuilding at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation!
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This is a hybrid event in-person at Writers & Books, 740 University Avenue
Rochester, NY and live streamed.
For Live Streaming tickets only please click HERE.
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