In Conversation: M. Soledad Caballero & Catharina Coenen

We welcome M. Soledad Caballero and Catherina Coenen to The Notebooks Collective to read from their new books. In addition, there will be a lively conversation about the thematic connections in their books including illness and the body as well as the commitment to female lineages, in particular around ideas of memory and storytelling. More specifically they will discuss the choice of genre for each of them, poetry and creative non-fiction respectively, and what drove them to explore and write in these genres. Because they came to creative writing later in their professional lives, they also hope to discuss what creative writing offers to the writing in their fields of literary studies and biology, and the ways interdisciplinary writing and thinking intersect with creative writing.

M. Soledad Caballero

M. Soledad Caballero is a Macondo, CantoMundo, and StoryKnife fellow, winner of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts’ 2019 Joy Harjo poetry prize and the 2020 SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest. She’s been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Ninth Letter, and other venues. Her essays have been published in The Hopkins Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere. I Was a Bell (2021) won Red Hen Press’s 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year, and was a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. Her second collection, Flight Plan, was published by Red Hen September 2025. She teaches at Allegheny College. She’s an avid tv watcher and a terrible birder.

Photo by Carly Masiroff.
Web: msoledacaballero.com
Instagram: m.soledadcaballero

Catharina Coenen

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 first book, “Unexploded Ordnance”, explores how the experiences of her mother, grandmother, and aunt during the bombings of World War II in Germany shaped her life and reverberate in the present.

Photo by Lydia Eckstein.
Web: www.catharinacoenen.com
Instagram: catharinacoenen
Bluesky: catharinacoenen.bsky.social