Chosen by Louise Glück for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Motherlands, by Weijia Pan, is an engrossing debut that interrogates history, identity, and the power of poetry to elucidate both.

Motherlands opens with a child drawn early to poetry. “In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall.” The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories—an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad—and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity.

In these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist’s duty—his duty—as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal—Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetry’s capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.

In celebration of his debut poetry collection Weija Pan will read alongside Dare Williams and Sara Ellen Fowler in the Wanda Coleman Theater. Book Signings before & after the readings.

Doors Open: 7:30 PM I Readings: 8:00 PM

Livestream: If you can’t join us in-person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event.

About the authors

Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is a third-year MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.

Dare Williams is a Queer HIV-positive poet, facilitator and literary worker rooted in Southern California. He has received support/fellowships for his work from Brooklyn Poets, Breadloaf, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. He has been awarded a California Arts Council Performance Grant, and a Peter Taylor Fellowship from The Kenyon Writers Workshop. His work has been featured in Kenyon Review, Foglifter, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine and a current student in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College.

Sara Ellen Fowler is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Interim, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. Her work has been supported by the Frost Place Conference on Poetry, HomeSchool–Claremont, and the Community of Writers. Sara holds a BFA in sculpture from Art Center College of Design and an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Riverside. In 2023, she was awarded a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship Award administered by Los Angeles Performance Practice for Los Angeles County. Her first book, Two Signatures, was selected by Joan Naviyuk Kane for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry in 2023 and will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2024.

This event is Free & In-Person at Beyond Baroque. Masks are encouraged while inside our center.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, fellow attendees, or performers.

Because this is a free event seating is limited. Please arrive early.