P&T Knitwear is pleased to welcome Erin Marie Lynch for a reading of her debut poetry collection, Removal Acts, along with an audience Q&A and book signing.

Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, Removal Acts reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence and, with “critical, capacious, and ingenious turn after turn” (Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat), traces a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.

Erin will be joined by Megan Fernandes, m.s. RedCherries, and Rachel Mannheimer. After the event, Erin will sign copies of her book.

RSVP HERE

Removal Acts takes its speaker’s fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of “removal” in its many forms — as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit — Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.

• This is a free in-store event with limited amphitheater-style seating
• We encourage all guests to wear masks.
• The talk will be followed by a book signing. Books signed at P&T Knitwear events must be purchased from P&T Knitwear. If you would like a signed copy and cannot attend the event, we’re happy to take your pre-order. We ship most places!

About the Authors

Erin Marie Lynch is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Hugo House. Her writing appears in Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.

Megan Fernandes is the author of I Do Everything I’m Told and Good Boys, and a finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Common, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. An associate professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College, Fernandes lives in New York City.

Rachel Mannheimer was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she works as an international book scout and as a contributing editor to The Yale Review. Her first book, Earth Room, was selected by Louise Glück as the inaugural winner of the Changes Book Prize and published in 2022.

m.s. RedCherries is a citizen of the Tsėhéstáno (Cheyenne Nation) of Montana. She received a J.D. from Arizona State University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut collection is forthcoming from Penguin Books in 2024.