Book launch for Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West by Julie Carr, Saturday, May 13, 2023, 7pm

Join us on Saturday, May 13, 2023, 7pm for a book launch for Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West by Julie Carr. Free and open to the public, also featuring:

Music: Benjamin Roberts

Film: Carolina Ebeid

Cake, Dance, Garden. 

Come celebrate!

Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists’ profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society.

Julie Carr is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein (Essay Press 2022), Real Life: An Installation (Omindawn 2018), Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta 2017), and Someone Shot my Book (University of Michigan Press 2018). Earlier books include 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects 2015). With Jeffrey Robinson she is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press 2015). Her co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory was published by Commune Editions in 2018. The Underscore, a book of poems, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2024.