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Meet the Author | Danika Stegeman Lemay

Meet the Author | Danika Stegeman Lemay
  • When May 06, 2022 from 04:00 PM to 05:00 PM (US/Eastern / UTC-400)
  • Where Buchanan District Library
  • Contact Name
  • Contact Phone 2696953681
  • Web Visit external website
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MEET THE AUTHOR | DANIKA STEGEMAN LEMAY
Join us at Buchanan District Library as we welcome Minneapolis-based author and poet, Danika Stegeman Lemay. Hear about her recent book, Pilot, and participate in an erasure (also called blackout) poetry activity. This program is best for adults and children middle school-aged and up. Light refreshments will be served.
Danika Stegeman LeMay’s debut collection, Pilot, is a delight to read. A new kind of erasure, the book pulls its raw materials from the popular TV series LOST, speaking from a common source through borrowed tongues. Like the Odyssey’s Penelope, LeMay weaves a tapestry within carefully set boundaries, only to unravel what’s been wrought and repeat, repeat, repeat. The landscape of the book is constructed at the crux of the lyric and the image and invites the reader in. It looks like a jungle that’s caught fire. Amid flames, the limits of confession and the confines of agency come into question. The voice is intimate; the gaze is violent. Ultimately, Pilot is a book about recovery and human connection. How do we save one another in a nearly consumed, increasingly isolated world?
Pilot is Danika Stegeman LeMay’s first full length book of poems. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, Aaron, and their daughter, Vera. Together they run Frontrunner Screen Printing in White Bear Lake, MN. Danika has an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Her work has appeared in Alice Blue Review, Cimarron Review, CutBank Literary Journal, Denver Quarterly, Forklift, OH, Juked, Lo-Ball, NOÖ Journal, Poetry City, USA, Sporklet, Word for/ Word, and elsewhere.
“LeMay’s poems show us that even those doomed get our shot at beauty, at connection, at joy, that, until nothing beside remains, what we say matters most about being human—in these blips that we call our lives—really does.” Matt Mauch