Wanda Campbell launches her fifth collection of poetry, Kalamkari and Cordillera: Poems of India and Chile, at the Acadia University Art Gallery, corner of Highland and Main.   The Reading is open to all members of the public. Books are available for sale at the Box of Delights and at the reading!

Wanda Campbell was born and grew up in Andhra Pradesh, South India and now teaches Creative Writing and Women’s Literature at Acadia University.  She has published a novel Hat Girl (2013) and four collections of poetry, Daedalus Had a Daughter (2011), Grace (2009), Looking for Lucy (2008), and Sky Fishing (1997), as well as the chapbook Haw[thorn] (2003). Her fifth collection of poetry reflects the variety of influences that have shaped the poet's craft. Kalamkari (from the Persian for "pen craft") refers to the hand-painted and block-printed textiles of South India where the poet grew up, and this section of the collection contains poems combining memories of her childhood with contemporary realities especially those affecting the lives of Indian girls and women. Cordillera (from the Spanish for "mountain chain") contains poems inspired by the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the country of Chile where he grew up in the shadow of the Andes. Because they were written at the fraught juncture between expectation and exile, appearance and reality, youth and age, memory and truth, these are at once poems of place and deeply personal.