Join us at Medicine for Nightmares for a celebratory reading of Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026), a new poetry collection from Preeti Vangani.
Preeti’s second collection has been lauded as a 'kaleidoscopic document of love and loss,' one that weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a late mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker’s Bombay home. Pierced with joy, with music and sweat, traffic and smoke, the collection layers family dynamics, gender roles, and the pain and pleasure of the speaker’s body, while drawing a living, lyric line between the “gone mother” and daughter. These poems are the fiercely loving, grieving, sexual, and always-processing songs for the grown children of mothers living in a world that takes without asking. Preeti will share a selection of poems from the book, with readings by poets T.S.Leonard, Lucie Periera and Dāshaun Washington. Followed by a book signing!
Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet & writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers, forthcoming from River River Books (Feb 2026). Her work has been published in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission and YBCA through which she facilitates poetry workshops rooted in writing grief through joy. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.
Lucie Pereira (she/her) is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Stanchion Zine, The Quarter(ly), and Silly Goose Press, among others. She is the food and beverage editor at Honey Literary, a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine, and the author of the chapbook, From Here to the Ocean (Finishing Line Press 2025). She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches second grade and co-hosts the reading and food pop-up series Kitchen Table.
Dāshaun Washington is a poet from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His work has received support from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, and beyond. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in San Francisco and is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he was previously a Wallace Stegner Fellow.
T.S. Leonard is a poet, performer, and author of works published in Foglifter, Poetry, and Fourteen Poems. Leonard’s debut poetry collection, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, was selected for the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize and will be published in 2026 by Fordham University Press. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.