"What a cause for celebration: an extended visit to Terese Svoboda’s expansive and piercing vision in which curiosity collides with critique and sparks wisdom ignites wonder. The unsettling dynamics of family the anxieties of global politics and the surprising encounters with the architecture of everyday life shape 'the membrane of lived moments' of this fierce and formidable book. When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley may be a place where 'every word from everyone hurts' but take solace, dear reader, Svoboda will turn each ache into an exquisite tune." —Rigoberto González

Terese Svoboda is the author of All Aberration Laughing Africa Treason Mere Mortals and Weapons Grade and the chapbook Dogs Are Not Cats.

A recent Guggenheim recipient she has won the Iowa Prize in Poetry the Cecil Hemley Award and the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. A fellow at Bellagio Bogliasco Yaddo the James Merrill House MacDowell and the NEH she also received a PEN/Columbia fellowship to translate Nuer song. She has taught at Williams Columbia's School of the Arts Southampton/Stony Brook the New School San Francisco State William and Mary Fairleigh Dickinson Sarah Lawrence Bennington Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Universities of Tampa Miami Fordham Wichita State and Hawaii in St. Petersburg and Kenya for the Summer Literary Programs and has held the McGee Professorship at Davidson College. She traveled to Kenya to talk to Somali refugees for the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. The author of six books of fiction a memoir and a book of translation from the Nuer she will publish a biography of the radical poet Lola Ridge in 2016.

"There are writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre...Terese Svoboda is one of those writers." - Bloomsbury Review

"Creating a western world as raucous and unpredictable as any imagined by Larry McMurtry and teeming with characters as tragically heroic as those created by Willa Cather" - Starred Booklist

"Discovering Ridge's work and life will be a delight for readers of women authors feminism and poetry especially those interested in activist writers." - Library Journal

"Svoboda's poems are as haunting as they are funny as pleasurable as they are powerful."--Publisher's Weekly