Award-winning memoirist Catharina Coenen with be reading from her work at Gannon University on September 22nd at 6 PM in Waldron Campus Center room 219. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
Catharina Coenen came to the United States from Germany as a Fulbright Scholar to attend graduate school. She now teaches biology at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, Best of the Net, and other literary magazines. Catharina is the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Flash Nonfiction Prize awarded by The Forge, the Appalachian Review’s Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and Residencies at Hedgebrook and at Millay Arts. Her essay collection, Unexploded Ordnance: What she felt. What they feared. How they survived. What they saw., is a 2025 Foreword Indies Silver Winner, short-listed for the Saroyan Prize, and also was long-listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. It explores how the experiences of Catharina's mother, grandmother, and aunt during the bombings of World War II in Germany shaped her life and reverberate in the present.
Please contact Dr. Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal for more information.
