Karen Kevorkian

Karen Kevorkian’s poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines including Antioch Review, Fiction International, 5 Fingers Review, Hambone, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Rio Grande Review, River City Review, Third Coast, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches poetry and fiction writing at the University of Virginia.


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Black text stating White Stucco Black Wing poems by Karen Kevorkian over a light grey background with the centered image of tree shadows.
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White Stucco Black Wing

Karen Kevorkian

Publication Date: March 1, 2004

$12.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 1-888996-78-1

Description:

OUT OF PRINT


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“In the poems of White Stucco Black Wing, Karen Kevorkian offers a meditation on the body as at once our source of knowing and our record of “what passes and passes/away” that world that we’re necessarily always leaving, making it all the more imperative that we look closely. These poems give refreshing witness to that imperative.” — Carl Phillips


“Through the white heat of language, a painterly imagination, and headlong into a story hinted at unread, these poems strike at the very heart of being. Karen Kevorkian takes us to that rare and ravishing place in poetry, to look at the thing and in the looking become. This is one wonderful book, as full of life as life is.”—Gillian Conoley


“Karen Kevorkian’s poems are hip enough to understand that in a white and black world there is only unfinished understanding. Only unfinished business, so to speak, and therein their human condition is pure presence”—Ralph Angel

News

Author of SUBDUCTION Kristen Millares Young Interviewed on Bomb Magazine!

I met Kristen Millares Young at Fort Worden, an Indigenous gathering place taken by the federal government, which installed concrete bunkers in the cliffs overlooking Salish Sea. Decommissioned for military service, the fort now hosts nonprofit arts organizations and visitors who come for the views. Some say the place is haunted. If so, it is […]

SUBDUCTION author Kristen Millares Young will speak on a panel at Orcas Island Lit Fest!

Saturday brings the main event: The festival’s featured authors will take to the stage for readings of their work and panel discussions like “Women Who Confound Expectations,” wherein Sonora Jha, Kristen Millares Young, Laura Read, and Alexandra Teague will discuss the shaping pressure that is exerted upon literature by the patriarchy. A book fair highlighting small […]

SUBDUCTION author Kristen Millares Young interviewed by Bomb Magazine!

I met Kristen Millares Young at Fort Worden, an Indigenous gathering place taken by the federal government, which installed concrete bunkers in the cliffs overlooking Salish Sea. Decommissioned for military service, the fort now hosts nonprofit arts organizations and visitors who come for the views. Some say the place is haunted. If so, it is […]

Kristen Young’s SUBDUCTION included in Book Riot’s #TheNewLatinBoom!

Latin American literature travels frequently in its original form, in translation, and through the presence of writers who don’t stay put. In the U.S., works by Latin American writers make their way to readers mostly in translation. However, there is a growing appreciation for a readership interested in works in Spanish. A new movement is brewing. Its effects […]

Kristen Millares Young & Khalisa Rae featured in PANK Magazine’s latest issue with new pieces!

PANK Magazine’s just released their 16th issue, which includes a Non Fiction piece titled Fathers Day written by Kristen Millares Young and poetry by Khalisa Rae titled Livestock. Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction, a Paris Review staff pick and a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards (best novel and best first novel). Khalisa Rae is […]

Johanna Stoberock, author of PIGS; Kristen Millares Young, author of SUBDUCTION; and Elissa Washuta, author of MY BODY IS A BOOK OF RULES featured in the Seattle Met reading list!

Pigs by Johanna Stoberock (2019) This grim, weirdo allegory—a little Lord of the Flies, a little Animal Farm—sets us down on a dystopian island inhabited by pigs that eat the world’s refuse: toasters, radioactive waste, toenail clippings. Four kids also live here, moving this garbage from the coast to the pigsty. Some adults also occupy the […]

Conversation with Kristen Millares Young by NYS Writers Institute!

“As a journalist, I’d always been interested in finding that space between what people say and what they do. That’s the way we use rhetoric to hold politicians accountable… As a novelist, I’m much more interested in that fertile territory between what we say and what we think.” Kristen Millares Young Watch the full conversation […]

SUBDUCTION author featured in The Rumpus!

In these disunited states, containing within them many sovereign nations, we are in what Biodun Jeyifo called “arrested decolonization.” And yet, as Mukoma Wa Ngugi wrote, “The work of decolonization is as personal as it is political.” My debut novel, Subduction, flickers between the perspectives of two protagonists converging on the same community. Subduction opens with the anthropologist […]

Interview Q&A with Kristen Millares Young in VOL. 1 Brooklyn

You evoke the landscape of Neah Bay incredibly well here; I’ve never been, but I felt a tactile sense of the place. How did you first become familiar with it?  Fifteen years ago, I began driving out to Neah Bay, which is just over four hours west of where I live. Like Claudia, I often […]

Kristen Millares Young article in The Rumpus!

As editor of SEISMIC:Seattle, City of Literature, I asked artists and storytellers to reflect on what it means for Seattle to be a City of Literature. While celebrating Seattle’s inclusion in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, this collection is not a commemoration. It is a call to action. How can literary culture influence social change? SEISMIC is a […]

Subduction recommended by High Country News!

One of the books I read this year and loved (and keep recommending!) is Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction, set on the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay, Washington. The story follows two characters: Claudia, an anthropologist who has spent the last few years conducting fieldwork among the Makah, and Peter, the son of one of her cultural […]

Electric Literature gives Kristen Millares Young’s SUBDUCTION a recommendation

Subduction by Kristen Millares Young In this debut novel by Cuban American journalist Kristen Millares Young, Mexican American anthropologist Claudia flees Seattle for the Olympic Peninsula Makah reservation after her husband leaves her for her younger sister. She hopes to disappear into the whaling village of Neah Bay under the cover of interviewing an elderly woman […]

Curated piece SEISMIC crafted by Kristen Millares Young re-broadcasted on KUOW radio!

The occasion was the publication of Seismic: Seattle, City of Literature, a collection of essays and poems about literature and social change, curated by author and journalist Kristen Millares Young. The work was published by Seattle City of Literature, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving Seattle’s literary community by connecting it to the world.

Here Are Some Great Virtual Book Events Happening This Week: Sept. 28–Oct. 3

Rachel Howzell Hall (And Now She’s Gone), Alyssa Cole (When No One Is Watching), Tiffany D. Jackson (Grown), and Tracy Deonn (Legendborn) in conversation for a Black Girl Mystery panel — hosted by Books Are Magic, 7 p.m. ET, more info. Nancy Jensen discusses her novel In Our Midst with Dzanc Books publisher and editor-in-chief, Michelle Dotter — hosted by Literati, 7 p.m. ET, more info. Read the full […]

A Message to the City from Kristen Millares Young

Good morning. It’s Friday, August 7, and we’re ending the week with something special: a message from the novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young, followed by a visual poem that is an excerpt from her debut novel Subduction.  Though Subduction came out April 14—not the best timing for a new work of art to enter the world—it is still getting amazing buzz. It’s […]

Skylit Interview: Kristen Millares Young, SUBDUCTION

Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and a betrayal by her sister, in the throes of a midlife freefall, Latina anthropologist Claudia Ranks retreats from Seattle to Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of […]

The Rumpus: Outsiders Looking In

I met Kristen Millares Young at AWP’s annual writing conference earlier this year. I sidled up, thrust my advance copy of Subduction in front of her to sign, and she said, “It’s about fucked up people trying to find their way.” Without yet reading a word, I was hooked.

Read Wilderness Excerpt: Subduction Chapter Seven

The pacific frothed at the shore, its distant gray spreading into white foam and retreating, flattened by its own mass against the long curve of the horizon. The sea has neither mercy nor pity, she thought, not recognizing her plagiarism for a full minute. Chekhov. Check off the boxes on your formal education and file it away; it does […]

LARB: En la Brega: An Interview with Kristen Millares Young

IN APRIL 2020, Red Hen Press published Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel, Subduction. Described by the novelist Shawn Wong as “a lyrical forest of storytelling rooted in indigenous voices,” Young’s book centers upon the field work of Latina anthropologist Claudia Ranks in Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village on the westernmost edge of the contiguous […]

The Seattle Time: Here’s what Seattle-based journalist, novelist and Hugo House writer-in-residence Kristen Millares Young is reading this month

This month: Seattle-based author and journalist Kristen Millares Young, whose excellent debut novel, “Subduction,” set in Neah Bay, is a staff pick at The Paris Review. Young earned her master’s degree in creative writing in 2012 from the University of Washington, was a fellow at Seattle’s Jack Straw Writers Program, and is now a prose writer-in-residence at Hugo House, where […]

HipLatina: 15 Latinx Summer Reads to Beat the Boredom

Subduction topped the New Release in Hispanic American Literature Amazon Kindle chart, so you know it’s a good read for summer.  Kristen Millares Young’s book follows Claudia, a Latina anthropologist who escapes drama at home for Neah Bay, part of the Makah Reservation in Washington. Her life changes when she meets Peter, who is back at […]

Go Forth: An Interview with Kristen Millares Young

Kristen Millares Young was a prize-winning journalist when I first met her and I first read the beginning of Subduction in a class I taught at the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference. It was clear she was both talented and ambitious and her pages were sharp and refined. Since then, she’s honed her craft, developing a […]

The Long Fight to Decolonize Book Research

Kristen Millares Young on Learning from Makah Tradition I am zipped into a tent on my friend’s beachfront lawn. Caring for her mom and kids, she has a full house, but on this crisp August night, I am glad to be ushered to the cusp of sleep by the churn of the Pacific. I am […]

Tracing the Fractures: A Conversation with Kristen Millares Young

I don’t remember when or how Kristen Millares Young and I became friends, but I know it happened in Coast Salish territory, specifically Seattle, where she lives and I left. Subduction, her debut novel just released by Red Hen Press yesterday, is a book I have known well for a long time. Set on the Makah Indian Reservation at the northwesternmost […]

April 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us

Ms. Magazine Ms. Feminist Know-It-All features Subduction! In this utterly unique and important first novel, Young examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.

On Diaspora, Encounter, and Emotional Restitution

There are a lot of moving, shifting pieces that comprise Kristen Millares Young’s stunning debut novel, Subduction; its characters are equal parts voyeurs and participants in their own unraveling, and the Pacific Northwest landscape they inhabit boasts its own treasure trove of secrets that continually capsizes their notions of self. The premise for the book is this: […]

Literary Events Go Virtual in the Time of COVID-19

Kristen Millares Young was preparing for a number of events this spring to support her novel Subduction. Now, she’s in a very different position — one of many writers lacking one of the most widespread and popular tools of promoting one’s book, i.e. a book tour. “The literary community is handmade,” Young told me. “Although I […]

Reviews

Thanks for the shoutout World Wide Work!

UNDER NUSHAGAK BLUFF by Mia C. Heavener, SUBDUCTION by Kristen Millares Young, and SUMMER OF THE CICADAS by Chelsea Catherine were all featured on the newsletter World Wide Work: Books, Films, Music You May Have Missed. To read more, click here.

Past as Place in Subduction

In Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction, one of the main characters, Peter, a member of the Makah tribe, talks about the past as a physical place that can hold you. In the heart of the book, Peter says he thinks that he has been pulled “into his past until he was here, but not here, inhabiting the […]

Rain Taxi: Subduction reviewed by Douglas Cole

Subduction is most of all a story of displacement and dislocation: for Claudia, whose Latina heritage lies over a border and whose sense of family lies beyond the betrayal that broke it; and for Peter, whose tragic fractures from family and community instill an “inner nihilist.” But Subduction is also a story of healing, through both traditional […]

Library Journal reviews Subduction

VERDICT Gorgeously, toughly written, this book dares to be open-ended yet leaves readers with a satisfying sense of how life really unfolds. Cultural clash matters here, but personal differences and desires even more. For any fiction reader looking beyond the obvious. [See “Winter/Spring Bests,” LJ 4/20.]Reviewed by Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal , Apr 03, 2020

The Paris Review: Staff Picks Subduction

Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel Subduction takes as its subject a subtle clash of culture in the Pacific Northwest. The novel’s protagonist, Claudia, is an anthropologist fleeing the remains of her marriage by reengaging with her most recent research project, the songs and traditional culture of the Makah people in Neah Bay, Washington. Claudia, a Latina, is […]