Join Marin County poet, author, filmmaker, and educator Amber Allen-Peirson for an intimate reading and conversation from her poetry collection, The Unrooted Bloom.
Intimate, lyrical, sometimes painful and sometimes playful, the poems move through race and biracial identity, motherhood, family, grief, love, ancestry, loneliness, resilience, and the complicated search for belonging. Amber writes from the spaces between identities and expectations, exploring what we inherit, what the world tells us about who we are, what we learn to carry in order to survive, and what we might eventually choose to put down.
At the center of the collection are questions: Where do I belong? Who am I when I am not trying to be who someone else needs me to be? What have I inherited? Where do I feel most fully myself? What am I still carrying? What do I get to choose?
But Amber’s questions are not offered because she believes she has found all the answers. They are an invitation.
Throughout the reading, audience members will be invited to turn the questions inside the poems toward their own lives, to consider their own identities, families, histories, losses, contradictions, and places of belonging. We may not share the same stories, but we can recognize the human longing beneath them: to be seen, to be safe, to be loved, and to have enough room to unfold into who we are becoming.
For Amber, reading these poems at the Mill Valley Library is also a homecoming. Marin is where she grew up, where she raised her son, and where many of her earliest questions about race, identity, home, and belonging first took root.
Part poetry reading, part storytelling, and part collective reflection, Where We Take Root invites us not simply to witness one woman's search for belonging, but to ask ourselves:
Where have I been planted? Where have I been uprooted? And where do I give myself permission to bloom?
Amber Allen-Peirson is a Marin County-based writer, filmmaker, educator, and speaker whose work explores identity, belonging, race, communication, and the stories we inherit. She is the author of the poetry collection The Unrooted Bloom and co-director and subject of the feature documentary of the same name, premiering at the 49th Mill Valley Film Festival. Amber is also the creator of The Three Identities™, an educational framework examining how we understand ourselves, how others perceive us, and what we project onto one another. Through poetry, film, teaching, and facilitated conversation, she creates spaces for people to examine who they are, what they carry, and how we might better understand one another.