Join us for an evening with award-winning Croatian poet, playwright, and novelist Monika Herceg, in conversation with Portland writer and musician Alicia Jo Rabins, celebrating her newest English-language collection, Closed Season.

Monika Herceg is an award-winning Croatian poet, playwright, and novelist, widely recognized as one of the most compelling contemporary literary voices from Southeast Europe. Her first poetry collection to appear in English, Initial Coordinates, was praised by the Los Angeles Review of Books as the work of "a major Croatian poet." Her newest English-language collection, Closed Season, transforms the idea of the "closed season", the brief period when hunted animals are protected into a devastating metaphor for women's lives under patriarchal violence. Fierce, formally inventive, these poems fuse the precision of physics with political urgency, exploring the body, power, motherhood, vulnerability, rage, and survival. Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk has described Herceg's poetry as "like a wound through which the world shines," praising its truth, anger, and hope for new stories