Join novelist Karen Russell and frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a reading and discussion of Russell’s new novel, The Antidote. This event took place on Monday, March 10, 2025, at 7:00 PM EDT.

In “Of Dust and Dreams,” a profile of the author in the March/April 2025 issue, Gresko explores Russell’s sixteen-year process of developing and writing her new novel, The Antidote, which opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, and follows a “prairie witch,” whose body serves as a vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his niece, player-captain of a high school basketball team who tries to learn to become a prairie witch; a scarecrow; and a photographer in possession of a time-traveling camera. 

In this virtual event, Russell read from the new novel and discussed with Gresko the years of Dust Bowl research that went into the book, the competing histories of the so-called American Dream of westward expansion that The Antidote confronts, and the realization that we all have lives that are connected at the roots.

 

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and the New Yorker’s 20 under 40. Now decisively over 40, she’s the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, among other honors. She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and daughter.

 

Brian Gresko is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Brooklyn. Their work has appeared on Slate, Longreads, the Atlantic, the Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in Poets & Writers Magazine, among numerous other publications. In 2014, Gresko edited the anthology When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Experience of Fatherhood (Penguin). They co-run the esteemed Pete's Reading Series in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For over ten years, Brian has led workshops and classes at organizations including Catapult, Sackett Street Writing Workshops, The Center for Fiction, Jericho Writers, and the New York Public Library. They are a founding member of Writing Co-Lab [2], an artist-owned teaching cooperative. Brian received an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and graduated from Oberlin College as a first-generation college student with a self-designed, cross-disciplinary major entitled "Narrativity in Film."