Hosted virtually by Alan Gunther of Smith Hill Library this month, we are excited to welcome Mary-Kim Arnold to discuss her experimental memoir, Litany for the Long Moment. Included in NPR’s Code Switch 2018 Book Guide and named Best of 2018 by Entropy Magazine, Litany for the Long Moment is about Arnold’s search for her Korean birth mother and explores the interconnectedness of language and identity through the lens of migration and cultural rupture. Check it out in our catalog!

Mary-Kim Arnold is a poet, writer, and artist. Her poetry collection, The Fish & The Dove, received a starred Publishers Weekly review and was the March 2020 Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection. Her other writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Mary-Kim graduated with Honors from Brown University with a B.A. in English and American Literature. She went on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown in Fiction. After more than a decade working in nonprofit administration, most notably as the Executive Director of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, she attended the Vermont College of Fine Arts and graduated with an MFA in Poetry. She now teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown and in The Newport MFA, a low-residency graduate program at Salve Regina University. She is the recipient of a 2020 Howard Foundation Fellowship, the 2018 MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the 2017 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She serves as Senior Editor for Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts at Tupelo Quarterly. Adopted from Korea and raised in New York, Mary-Kim lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children.