Join us for a special evening celebrating No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press), the debut collection by Samyak Shertok, winner of the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Part elegy, part witness, and part love letter, Shertok’s book traces the fault lines between language and loss, father and homeland, grief and memory. Born in Nepal, Shertok writes across borders and tongues, exploring how the unspeakable finds form through poetry.

For this launch, he’ll be joined by some of Dallas’s most exciting literary voices —  Katie Condon, Sanderia Faye, Mag Gabbert, L.A. Johnson, and Sebastian Páramo — for a reading that celebrates the city’s growing poetry community and its connections to global traditions. The evening will be emceed by Jordan Young, a recent SMU graduate whose work explores identity and digital storytelling.

About the book

Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok’s oral mother tongue, Tamang: How do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence, and unknowability signified by “X,” the poems dwell on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from the perspective of school children reveals how a war can fracture the psyche of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a “reverse-elegy” for his mother, meditates on the impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making, and mythopoeticism.

About the author

Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.

Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she is an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University.

Sanderia Faye is the author of Mourner’s Bench, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction, Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit for fiction, and Arkansas Library Association, Arkansiana Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and Southwest Review.

Mag Gabbert is the author of the full-length collection SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award in Poetry. She teaches at Southern Methodist University and serves as the Poet Laureate of Dallas.

L. A. Johnson is from California. She is the author of Lost Music, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2027, and the chapbook Little Climates. Under Editor David She is an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis, forthcoming in 2026 from Graywolf Press.

Sebastian Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning, a finalist for the Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and is Assistant Editor at Texas Review Press. He lives in Texas.

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