Book of Poetry Launch – Nicole Lachat in conversation with Ber Anena – The Red We Silk
Join us in welcoming poet Nicole Lachat as she presents her new book of poetry The Red We Silk. Nicole will be joined in a special conversation with fellow writer, Ber Anena. This event will be held on Tuesday, June 30th and is open to the public!
To order your copy of The Red We Silk, follow the link HERE!
About the Book:
The Red We Silk collects inherited migrations and the weight of familial journeys into a lyric investigation of displacement and longing. Memory abides in the body and the body in memory, propelling the speaker through geographical and spiritual landscapes, desires, and griefs toward the transformative work of discovery. Tender, attentive, and multivocal, these are poems of belonging beyond borders.
About the Author:
Nicole Lachat was born in Edmonton, Canada, to a Peruvian mother and a Swiss father. She holds PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. Her debut collection, The Red We Silk, was the recipient of the 2024 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Ruminate Magazine, One by Jacar Press, Birdfeast Magazine, The Puerto Rico Review, and Poets.org, among others. She was awarded the 2022 Wilbur Gaffney Poetry Prize through the Academy of American Poets and received a 2024 Individual Arts Fellowship through the Nebraska Arts Council. She is a mentor for Adroit Journal’s 2026 Summer Mentorship Program. Nicole currently resides in Canada.
About Speaker:
Ber Anena is a writer from Gulu, Uganda. She attended the MFA Writing program at Columbia University and is finalizing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she has received the Vreeland Prize for Fiction and the Susan Atefat Peckham Prize for Poetry. Anena’s debut poetry collection, A Nation in Labour, won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2018. Her works appear in or are forthcoming from Transition Magazine, Wasafiri, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic, adda, Off Assignment and Black Warrior Review. Her prose has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated forthe Pushcart. Anena’s memoir, THE LIES WE TELL FOR AMERICA is out on November 10, 2026 from Flatiron Books by Macmillan.
Praise for collection:
“The Red We Silk is an impressive debut that captures with elegance and ease the truly twenty-first century phenomenon of multiple migrations and cultural intersections as they manifest in the body of a gifted poet. Nicole Lachat frames these considerations within the Peruvian myth of Chasqui, who becomes for her a migrant voicing the poetic implications of uprooting and replanting in different spaces. Lachat’s brilliantly generous poems of deep sentiment and spiritual interrogation explore themes of family, memory, place, and desire with resonant beauty.”–Kwame Dawes
“Reader, this is no ordinary debut. Nicole Lachat knows that all borders are lies. Citizen and immigrant. Land and body. Parent and child. The quick and the dead. Whatever lines you believe in, whatever lines you draw, prepare to have them dissolved. ‘Because you come / ready for war–swearing lightning, swearing / thunder–I come light-footed. I become / leaf.’ Lachat is here to say that no onehas the right to divide us, not even us, that our survival depends on this: knowing we are each other, knowing we can still become our softest selves. The Red We Silk will change you.”–Rebecca Gayle Howell
“In this timely debut, Nicole Lachat’s lyric verve shapes the very ground of ordinary living into a personal history that threads memory with an urgent desire for bonds that survive and transform the temporal, emotional, and otherwise disfiguring work of distance. Arresting and smashing.”–Canisia Lubrin