VIRTUAL: M. Soledad Caballero Launches I WAS A BELL at White Whale Bookstore

Please register for this event by snagging a ticket on Eventbrite! There are both free tickets and pay-what-you-can tickets available. Registration will end at 6:30pm ET on 9/10.

We’re thrilled to celebrate the release of local poet and professor M. Soledad Caballero’s collection, I Was a Bell!! She’ll be joined by Celeste Gainey, Sarah Williams-Devereux, and Cameron Barnett for a reading.

You can pre-order signed copies of Soledad’s book, I Was a Bell, below through our website! Some of these authors’ books are available on our Bookshop.org list for recent and upcoming events.

“I Was a Bell is a triumph, a gutting cry of love and longing for all that migration sows and uproots in the survivors of exile. In retracing her family’s story of leaving Chile under Pinochet to 1980s Oklahoma, M. Soledad Caballero gives soaring voice to the ways history, memory, and the collective weight of our disappeared lives silenced, but never unheard, in our bodies and hearts. It’s hard to express how much these poems made unnamed parts of me feel seen.” —Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home and Chasing the Sun

M. Soledad Caballero is Professor of English and co-chair of the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Allegheny College. She is a Macondo fellow, a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, has been a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffry E. Smith poetry prize, a finalist for the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, was winner of the 2019 Joy Harjo poetry contest sponsored by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and winner of SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest.

Celeste Gainey is the author of the poetry collection, the GAFFER, cited by O, The Oprah Magazine as one of “8 New Books of Poetry to Savor” in 2015. Her chapbook, In the land of speculation & seismography, was runner-up for the prestigious Robin Becker Prize. She has been a Hedgebrook Writer in Residence as well as a presenting poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and is currently the inaugural City Of Asylum’s Poet Laureate for Allegheny County.

Sarah Williams-Devereux is a poet and teacher of writing. Her poetry appears in the journals F(r)ictionLog, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Sampsonia Way Magazine, and Pittsburgh City Paper; in the anthologies Show Us Your Papers, Is It Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? Women Over 40 Write on Aging, Nasty Women & Bad Hombres, and Pittsburgh Love Stories; and on WESA-FM’s Prosody. She teaches poetry for the Madwomen in the Attic program at Carlow University and is the series editor for the annual Madwomen anthology, Voices from the Attic.

Cameron Barnett holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and teaches middle school English. He’s an editor for Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, and winner of the 2019 Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Emerging Artist. His recent work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Minnesota Review, Rattle, and IDK Magazine. His first collection, The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.