Kristen Wittman Book Launch

Join us as we celebrate the launch of Kristen Wittman’s new poetry collection Death Becomes Us (Turnstone Press). This event features a reading and a conversation hosted by Charlene Diehl, Director of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. Presented as part of THIN AIR 2021 in partnership with McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Kristen Wittman Book Launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. The video will be available for viewing thereafter. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Beginning with halcyon days cast in soft light and cool dew, onward through veiled years of diagnosis and environmental damage, Death Becomes Us captures, with masterful grace and restraint, the intensity of absence and the importance of grief. Within the darkest moments of personal loss, Kristen Wittman’s second collection fashions a garden of love poems from memories of soft kisses giving way to the falling towers of a broken Eden. Here, where pain nurtures tender new petals, the ceaseless heartbeat of Mother Nature pulses underfoot, bringing forth every new dawn.

Kristen Wittman was born in Winnipeg and grew up on a farm west of Headingley. She received her law degree from the University of Manitoba and now practises at Taylor McCaffrey LLP in Winnipeg. Her poems have been published in CV2 and Crosswinds Poetry Journal, among others. Death Becomes Us is her second book.

Host Charlene Diehl is a writer, editor, teacher, performer, and the Director of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. Widely published, her 2010 book Out of Grief, Singing: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss was shortlisted for two Manitoba Book Awards. Diehl also serves as the producer of the Izzy Asper Jazz Performances series, and in 2019 she received the Winnipeg Arts Council’s Making a Difference Award.