CECILIA WOLOCH reads from her novella SUR LA ROUTE

Sur La Route (Quale Press)

 Please welcome back to Skylight Books, local poet Cecilia Woloch!

Sur la Route is a novella in postcard-like vignettes — a series of brief, vivid, poetic episodes that trace the path of a disaffected American woman “on the road” in France and western Europe. It’s the winter of 1994 and she’s fled the blandness of Los Angeles for Paris, carrying with her only a list of the names of friends-of-friends, a couple of battered suitcases and a longing to be part of a more sensual, nuanced, mysterious world. She moves breathlessly through that world, the peripatetic rhythm of events mirrored in the restless, lyrical narrative. Along the way, she falls in love with a man, a woman, a city, a way of being in the world, and her own life. By turns sexy, intriguing, and passionate, her experiences require her to open her own heart as widely as possible, even (and always) at the risk of breaking it.

Cecilia Woloch is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Carpathia (BOA Editions 2009)and Tzigane, le poème Gitan (Scribe-l’Harmattan 2014), the French translation of her second book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem. The text of Tsigan has also been adapted for multi-media performances in the U.S. and Europe. Her novella, Sur la Route, a finalist for the Colony Collapse Prize, is being published by Quale Press in 2015, along with a new collection of poems, Earth, winner of the Two Sylvias Press Prize for the chapbook. Other honors include The Indiana Review Prize for Poetry, The New Ohio Review Prize for Poetry, the Scott Russell Sanders Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, CEC/ArtsLink International, Chateau de la Napoule Foundation, the Center for International Theatre Development and others. Her work has been translated and published in French, German, Polish and Ukrainian. The founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and The Paris Poetry Workshop, she has also served on the faculties of a number of creative writing programs and teaches independently throughout the U.S. and around the world.