Kim Noriega Book Launch

She has won the San Miguel Literary Sala Flash Nonfiction Prize and has been a finalist for both the Edna St. Vincent Millay and Joy Harjo Poetry Prizes. Her poem “Heaven, 1963,” was featured in former poet laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column American Life in Poetry. She is the poetry editor of The Poetry Distillery and a teaching artist with The Poetry Barn. She is a certified facilitator of the creative regeneration process and an expert consultant in family literacy through the Pacific Library Partnership. She lives in San Diego with her husband, Ernie, and six cats, five of whom were once feral.

She will be reading from (and selling copies of) Naming the Roses.

About Naming the Roses by Kim Noriega

“‘Name Me,’ the opener of this long-awaited collection, is a tour de force, it storms in with its chilling juxtaposition of romance and violence in the strong, unapologetic voice of a woman. Kim Noriega is masterful at hitting the right tone with her uncompromising stark naming of male-on-female brutality, using a detailed storyteller’s specificity that reaches effortlessly into collective experience. She does not shrink from beauty either, a subtle beauty, infused with a sense of familiarity that makes her words feel like home. Home, from the womb to the wedding, abuse, suicides, silences, apples, birthdays, heirlooms, the presence of green, waterfalls, horses, tastes, sensual detail, all of the roses, ‘that magical / black rain, / ecstasy, / a flurry of starlings.’ I only wish I could inhabit the unashamed, unpitying, beautiful, warm, defiant spirit of this book that rises off it like steam.”