The Intimacy Trials by Aja Couchois Duncan @Central

reading and conversation with Theresa Harlan and Ámate Pérez

The Intimacy Trials is new collection of post-apocalyptic Native poetry by Aja Couchois Duncan. She will be joined by Ámate Pérez and Theresa Harlan for readings and discussion.

Join us for an author event with Aja Couchois Duncan, Theresa Harlan, and Ámate Pérez, featuring readings from all three artists, including Couchois Duncan's newest collection of poetry, The Intimacy Trials.

When: Saturday June 27th, 4 - 5:30pm

Where: Central Library, Mystery Room on the 2nd floor. 2090 Kittredge St.

About The Intimacy Trials: "A post-apocalyptic Native poetry collection that creates possibility for repair and reconciliation by holding the simultaneity of a violent past and a hopeful future. Aja Couchois Duncan's third book of poetry, The Intimacy Trials, explores cycles of violence, loss, and love that arc across history. Composed of intersecting narratives, this collection follows a post-apocalyptic collective of survivors living in a state of gratitude, shame, and awe amid desecrated ecosystems. The present tense of The Intimacy Trials carries the magnitude of a historic past tense filled with land theft, genocide, settler colonialism, and the vicissitudes of romantic love. Couchois Duncan's lyrical, concomitant stories produce a space that holds in balance the complexities of life-joy, despair, intimacy, and irreconcilable grief. In language that is prophetic, lush, and unequivocal, The Intimacy Trials is a loving accountability letter to our past, present, and future selves, holding both our yearning for connection and the remembrance of what has driven us apart"-- Provided by publisher

Aja Couchois Duncan is a social justice coach and capacity builder of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent living on the ancestral and stolen lands of the Coast Miwok / Tamal-ko people. Her debut collection, Restless Continent (Litmus Press, 2016) was selected by Entropy Magazine as one of the best poetry collections of 2016 and awarded the California Book Award for Poetry in 2017. In 2020, Sweet Land—a collaborative opera project which brought together composers Raven Chacon and Du Yun, librettists Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney, and co-directors Cannupa Hanska Luger and Yuval Sharon—was produced in the Los Angeles State Historic Park to critical acclaim and named the Best Opera of 2020 by the Music Critics Association of North America. Her most recent book, The Intimacy Trials came out in Spring of 2026 by the University of Chicago Press as part of its Phoenix Poets series. When not writing or working, Aja can be found running the west Marin hills, training with horses, or weaving small pine needle baskets. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as worthy. Great Spirit knew it all along. 

Born in San Francisco Theresa Harlan is blessed with two families who shape and inform her self knowledge and awareness as an Indigenous woman. By birth she is Jemez Pueblo and an enrolled member of Kewa Pueblo of New Mexico. Theresa is the daughter of her adopted parents Elizabeth Campigli Harlan (Támal-ko/Coast Miwok) and John Harlan (Euro-American). Theresa was raised and nourished on the stories and lives of her Támal-ko/Coast Miwok family and ancestors. As an advocate for Indigenous ancestral lands and the director of the Alliance for Felix Cove, she works to rematriate her mother’s Felix family home at Point Reyes National Seashore. Theresa and her family are featured in the Emergence Magazine podcast, “Coming Home to the Cove: A Story of Family, Memory and Stolen Land”. Published essays include, “A View of Our Home, Tomales Bay, Calif.: Portrait of a Coast Miwok Family, 1930-1945” in Our People, Our Land, Our Images: Indigenous Photographers, Heyday Books, 2006. 

Photo credit: Haley Rains

Ámate Pérez is a Nahua indigenous person from Kuskatlan (El Salvador), a mother, justice warrior, two-spirit activist, a martial artist and healer. Ámate and her family fled the Salvadoran civil war in the early 1980’s. She grew up as undocumented child in Los Angeles and benefited from the 1986 immigration reform law. She has a B.A. from UCSD and a master’s in journalism from UCB. She lives in Inverness, CA on Coast Miwok and Tamal-ko Indian territory. Ámate has been published by the SF Chronicle, the Progressive and Yes! Magazines and a number of other daily newspapers and social justice movement building blogs. One of her personal essays, Dust Angels, was published in The Wandering Song, the first anthology of Central American writers living in the United States.

She is currently working on her first book, Germinated Seed, A Memoir of Survival, Reclamation, and the Long Walk Home.

Please call us at 510.981.6100 with any questions.

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