An Afternoon With Author Cathrina Coenen
Discussing Her Latest Book Of Essays, Unexplored Ordnance
Saturday, November 1st, 2025
4:00 - 5:00pm
Blue Heron Books
High Falls, NY
Her first book, Unexploded Ordnance, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, seeks to answer how we are shaped by the stories we inherit. After moving from Germany to the United States to work as a professor of biology, Coenen takes up residence in a second language to voice the questions she could not ask at home: what exactly did her family live through during World War II, and to what extent are they implicated? What terrors did her grandmother, mother, and aunt endure, and why are women’s wartime stories so hard to find? How much of the self is shaped by the traumas and passions that come to us through our DNA? Balancing literature with historical research, old letters with new conversations, Coenen peels back generational silences to walk alongside her grandmother as she comes of age during Hitler’s rise to power, watches her friends disappear one by one, and flees bombing raids with her tiny daughters, escaping from city to town, rented room to orphanage, parish house to hospital, trying to survive. Unexploded Ordnance moves between the personal and the universal, weaving reflections on language, biology, queerness, art, and memory.
CATHARINA COENEN is a German immigrant to northwestern Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her essays have appeared in The Southampton Review Online, Threepenny Review, Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere.
Instagram: https://instagram.com/catharinacoenen
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/catharinacoenen.bsky.social
Web: www.catharinacoenen.com
"Unexploded Ordnance invites the reader to think, perhaps for the first time, about the intersection of science, immigration, choice, and memory... These essays are themselves small grenades thrown against walls of silence, denial, and shame." — Prize Judges Grace Talusan, Jiaming Tang, and Ilan Stavans
"A triumph in gripping, masterful prose chronicling the lives of three generations of German women marked by war... A poignant and unforgettable debut." — Ani Gjika, author of An Unruled Body
"This collection challenges the limits of memory and identity shaped by trauma, speaking with courage and elegy about the inherited burdens of war, trauma, and silence across generations." — Literary Hub praise