Eiren Caffall at the University of Dubuque -- April 14.
Monday, April 14, 6 p.m.
University of Dubuque Multicultural Student Center, 2000 University Avenue, Dubuque IA
With Kirkus calling her 2025 novel All the Water in the World "gripping, beautifully descriptive, and likely to stay with you," its author Eiren Caffall will be the featured guest in the Archway Reading and Lecture Series at the University of Dubuque, her April 14 reading and subsequent Q&A session taking place in the campus' Multicultural Student Center at the Peter and Susan Smith Welcome Center.
An author and musician based in Chicago, Caffall is the author of the award-winning memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary (Row House Publishing, 2024) and the novel All the Water in the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2025). Her writing on loss and nature, oceans, and extinction has appeared in Orion, Writer’s Digest, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and Elements: Volume IV: Fire (The Center for Humans and Nature, 2024). Caffall received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for The Mourner’s Bestiary and a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship in environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She has been awarded residencies at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Millay Colony for the Arts, MacDowell (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Additionally, Caffall has guest lectured at universities across America, taught creative writing for the Chicago Humanities Festival, and more.
Caffall's 2025 novel All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.
Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story – with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most – love and work, community and knowledge – will survive. In a starred review, the Library Journal called Caffall's novel "captivating," adding that "the setting, the detailed emotive descriptions, and nail-biting adventure are incandescent."
Eiren Caffall participates in the Archway Reading and Lecture Series at the University of Dubuque on April 14, participation in the 6 p.m. event is free, and more information is available by calling (563)589-3267 and visiting Dbq.edu.
