Strange Wreckage with Author Naomi J. Williams and Poet Robin Beth Schaer

• Books & Literature

Novelist Naomi J. Williams and poet Robin Beth Schaer will share their recent writing and discuss the shipwrecks and mysterious encounters that haunt their work. Williams will read from her new novel, Landfalls, which reimagines an ill-fated 18th-century expedition to circumnavigate the globe, and Schaer will read poems from her debut Shipbreaking, which examines the fragile and combustible relationship between humans and nature. Together, they will consider their research and rendering of impossible journeys, scientific experiments, cannibalism, electrocution, startling escapes, and tragic wrecks.

Naomi J. Williams was born in Japan and spoke no English until she was six years old. Her debut novel, Landfalls (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a fictionalized account of the 18th-century Lapérouse expedition, was published in August 2015. Naomi lives with her family in Davis, California, where she’s started work on her second book, a novel about the early 20th-century Japanese poet Yosano Akiko.

Robin Beth Schaer is the author of the poetry collection Shipbreaking (Anhinga 2015). Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Paris Review, and Guernica, among others. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, Saltonstall, Vermont Studio Center, and VCCA. She teaches writing in New York City and worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot ship lost in Hurricane Sandy.