Join us for an afternoon courtyard reading with professor and essayist, Jennifer Sinor, as she celebrates her new novel about the unassuming beauty and grace of the Great Plains, The Beautiful Plain.
Jennifer will be joined by yoga practitioner and scholar, Michael Sowder, author of Sacred Letters.
About The Beautiful Plain:
Set amid the cornfields of central Nebraska, The Beautiful Plain opens on a hot afternoon in a hay barn, where three adolescents push a cardboard box filled with a girl to the edge of the loft. What begins as a prank will reverberate for decades, especially for Laura, who learns that afternoon just how far she will travel for acceptance. Rejected by her former husband and with her precocious child in tow, Laura returns to her hometown of Platte, Nebraska, to see if she can recover what was sent to the ground that summer afternoon long ago. Immersed in the unassuming beauty of the Great Plains and following a single year of one woman’s life, The Beautiful Plain invites the reader to reconsider where beauty and grace reside.
Advance Praise for The Beautiful Plain:
“A study in guilt, grief, and reawakening, The Beautiful Plain examines the bifurcation that comes from the suppression of our shadow selves. Through fragmented recollections—ancestral diaries, personal memories, and traumatic stories of war—Jennifer Sinor interrogates what it means to know and not know, to see and not see, to blindly box ourselves in while the wild world goes on without us, as well as the courage and community it takes to turn and face the refining fire of our own agency.”—Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
About Jennifer Sinor:
Jennifer Sinor is the author of five books of creative nonfiction and a novel entitled The Beautiful Plain. Her essay collections include Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World and Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe. The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism, her work has appeared in Best American Essays and The Norton Reader. Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English.
About Sacred Letters:
In Sacred Letters, Michael Sowder offers poetic meditations on the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet as key to understanding Yoga and the Divine.
These original meditations on the Sanskrit letters range from personal narratives to metaphysical and theological speculations, linguistic play, and inter-spiritual allusions to other works and traditions, all relevant to living a contemplative life in the contemporary world. Sowder’s book is anchored in a devotional Tantrik, Śaiva-Śakta tradition, focused on the Divine Feminine, but allusions to western mystics (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) also appear frequently. No other book like this exists.
About Michael Sowder:
Called by David Bottoms, “one of our finest spiritual poets,” Michael Sowder, long-time yoga practitioner, poet, scholar, Sanskritist, essayist, and father writes about wilderness, fatherhood, yoga, Buddhism, and inter-spirituality.
An emeritus professor of English and an Affiliated Faculty Member of Yoga Studies and Religious Studies at Utah State University, he teaches meditation, Sanskrit, yoga, and philosophy at Utah State, at the Amrita Yoga Meditation Foundation, which he founded, at Sol Speak Yoga Studio and other venues. He is available for lectures, teachings, and leading retreats.