“Women, Nature, and Resistance,” a Conversation with Maryann Lesert and Katie Kalisz

Join us in Okemos for an event with authors Maryann Lesert and Katie Kalisz! This event is perfect for anyone who is interested in themes of nature, social issues, and how we can make a difference.

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About Land Marks:

Land Marks is a timely story of friendship, hope, and resistance as the call to “Drill, baby, drill!” returns and Big Oil & Gas makes big plans for all of our places.

Once you've experienced the devastation of fracking, nothing but stopping it makes sense.

In the river-crossed northwoods of Michigan, Kate, Brett, Sonya, and Mark, mentored by their former professor Rebecca, keep watch as North American Energy (NorA) connects a corridor of frack well sites deep in the state forests. When NorA expands in unexpected directions and their awful, bigger plan becomes clear, the action begins.

As grassroots activists gather and prepare to stop NorA’s dangerous superfrac, stresses other than the fracturing of the bedrock appear. Sonya is arrested, Rebecca reveals her hidden past, and the one person who knows both women’s stories arrives in camp. Love and solidarity want to win, even if most showdowns with Big Oil don’t end well for those who take a stand.

Suspenseful, poignant, and galvanizing, Land Marks is a tribute to the waterways that connect us, the land that sustains us, and the moments that inspire us to rise up and say, “No more!”

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://www.schulerbooks.com/book/9781647426460

About Flu Season:

From Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2023-2026: "In Katie Kalisz's Flu Season, a welcome is also a warning. Daily anxieties caution us at every cough and intersection and goodbye kiss. There are dreads we pass down, an inheritance of fear that blooms at each creep of poison ivy, each thunderhead. Kalisz investigates the way time slows during illness, the season opening up and every act becoming a prayer. These poems engage with the idea of home-its serpentine surprise, its necessary violence, its bondage of calm. There are tendernesses we can't live without, and so these poems search for a place in the earth where we could hide from the world we've made."

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://www.schulerbooks.com/book/9781960329882

About the Authors:

Maryann Lesert writes about people and place in equal measure. Her first novel, Base Ten (Feminist Press 2009) follows a scientist’s quest for self among Lake Michigan’s forested dunes and the stars. Land Marks (She Writes 2024) grew from two years of boots-on-well-sites research on fracking and was a Foreword Indies Finalist for Book of the Year. Maryann’s plays have been published by New Issues and Smith & Kraus, and her articles featured on EcoWatch and In These Times. Maryann lives in west Michigan, where she enjoys time spent in the natural world (shared with family and friends) and writes by the big lake.

Katie Kalisz is a Professor in the English Department at Grand Rapids Community College, where she teaches composition and creative writing. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Loyola University of Chicago, and Queens University of Charlotte. Quiet Woman, her first book, was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her second book, Flu Season, from Cornerstone Press was published in spring of 2025. She is the recipient of a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She lives in Michigan with her husband and their three children.