We are delighted to welcome authors Cat Pleska and Karen Salyer McElmurray to speak with Magin LaSov Gregg about their latest novels in a unique author panel. Focusing on themes of identity, faith, and human connection, Cat’s book My Life in Water and Karen’s book I Could Name God in Twelve Ways each reveals the shared experiences of the working class community. Following their conversation, Cat, Karen, and Magin will take questions from the audience and sign books.
This author panel will be held at 2:00 pm-3:00 pm on Saturday, May 10 at Middletown Public Library.
This event is presented in partnership with Frederick County Public Libraries and is free and open to the public. For accessibility requests, email info@curiousiguana.com at least two (2) weeks prior to the event.
About Cat Pleska: Cat Pleska, a native West Virginian, is an award-winning author, educator, and storyteller. Her memoir, Riding on Comets, was published by West Virginia University Press. Her current memoir is My Life in Water, UnCollected Press. Cat edited four anthologies and her stories and essays have appeared in The Appalachian Heritage Anthologies, Still: The Journal, Heartwood Magazine, Change 7 Magazine, and many others. She teaches in Marshall University’s English Department and in the Graduate Humanities Program.
About Cat’s book, My Life in Water: “My Life in Water is a collection of essays about the fluidity of life, its ebb and flow. Each essay tells the story of a time when one comes close to drowning, floats in joy and peace, watches others sink or swim. It’s about how liquid of some type, such as membranous croup, wild river rapids, floods, small islands, the rising ocean tides—can bring deep realizations to help connect the individual to the basic elements of life, to navigate its streams.
“Strap on a life jacket and dive into this often perilous, at times funny, always poignant collection bubbling with the language of water. Ever present is the danger of drowning from inattentive caregivers, from white-water rapids or a bridge collapse into a roiling river. From fluid-filled lungs gasping with croup or pneumonia. But water also brings healing and an understanding that navigating tricky waters, whether literal or metaphorical, has made Cat the surest captain of her own life.”
~ Marie Manilla, author of Patron Saint of Ugly
About Karen Salyer McElmurray: Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. As a fiction writer, she is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work in nonfiction has been a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for the Essay, the New Southerner Award, the Orison Anthology Award for Creative Nonfiction and, most recently, the LitSouth Award. She has co-edited, with poet Adrian Blevins, an essay collection called Walk till the Dogs Get Mean, Wanting Radiance, a novel, and Voice Lessons, a short collection of lyric essays, came out in 2021. A new essay collection, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways came out in September 2024 from University Press of Kentucky.
About Karen’s book, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: I could dream in poetry, could summon words for spiritual experience, could name God in twelve ways and in ten times and places in history.
Award-winning writer Karen Salyer McElmurray details her life’s journey across continents and decades in a poetic collection that is equal parts essay-as-memoir, memoir-as-Künstlerroman, and travelogue-as-meditation.
It is about the deserts of India. A hospital ward in Maryland. The blue seas of Greece. A greenhouse in Virginia. It is about the spirit houses of Thailand. The mountains of eastern Kentucky. The depths of the Grand Canyon. A creative writing classroom in Georgia. An attic in a generations-old house. It is about coming to terms with both memory and the power of writing itself.
At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, McElmurray probes her personal history from the stance of different places, perspectives, and vulnerabilities as she tenderly and fiercely searches for acceptance and a place to call home.
About Magin LaSov Gregg: Magin LaSov Gregg teaches courses in literature and writing at Frederick Community College, where she advises the award-winning literary magazine Tuscarora Review. Her memoir in essays, An Altar in My Heart, is a two-time Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize finalist (2023 and 2024). Magin’s creative nonfiction has been noted in Best American Essays, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and appeared in the Washington Post, Gettysburg Review, Bellingham Review, National Public Radio, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Recent poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review and Offerings: A Spiritual Poetry Anthology from Tiferet Journal.
