Catharina Coenen Books In Order

Publication Order of Collections

Catharina Coenen is a published writer and a biologist.

She came to the United States from Germany through her position as a Fulbright Scholar so that she could go to graduate school. Catharina received the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing as well as a flash nonfiction prize awarded by The Forge, the Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize from the Appalachian Review, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation “Science-as-Story” Fellowship, and also Writing Residencies held at Hedgebrook and Milay Arts.

Her essay collection Unexploded Ordnance came out to rave reviews and was longlisted for the PEN/America Jean Stein book award. In addition to writing, she teaches biology in Pennsylvania at Allegheny College. She has written essays that have been featured in such places as The American Scholar, the Christian Science Monitor, The Threepenny Review, Best of the Net, and other literary magazines.

The book explores how the experiences held by her aunt, mother and grandmother during the bombings of World War II in Germany ended up helping to share her life and to echo in the present.

Unexploded Ordnance is a book by Catharina Coenen and the winner of the 2023 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. In this unique and imaginative prose that interrogates the past with the curiosity of a poet and the pen of a scientist, this book looks to answer the question of how are we shaped by the very stories that we inherit?

Catharina moved from Germany to go to the United States to work as a biology professor. Now she is taking up residence in a second language to try and voice the questions that she was not able to ask at home. She wants to know what her family lived through during the second World War and the extent to which they are implicated.

She also wants to know the terrors that her mother, aunt, and grandmother went through and the reason why wartime stories from women are so difficult to find. Catharina would also love to know just how much of our self ends up being shaped by the passions and traumas that end up coming to us through our DNA.

Coenen is able to take literature and make it evenly exist side by side with historical research. She includes new conversations and old letters and pulls back on generational silences so that she could walk by her grandmother as she ends up coming of age as Hitler took his ascension to power, watching her friends disappear each one on their own at a time, and doing her best to flee the bombing raids along with her small daughters.

She escapes from the city to town, from the rented room to the orphanage, from the parish house to the hospital, doing her best to try and survive and to make it on her own. Putting together different reflections on biology, language, art, memory, queerness and more, the author is able to skillfully move through the universal and the personal to create a completely unique book that is different from any other one on the market today!

Readers will feel like they are taking a look back into the past and peering through history in a way that is really one of the only ways to communicate what things were like: storytelling. Check out this book for yourself and see why Catharina Coenen has done such an immense job with this work. Whether you’re reading it on your own or picking it for your next book club, this book is as engaging as it is informative. With so much fluff content out there these days, read something of substance that you can look back on and see the value of how you have spent your time and add this incredible book to your list of completed books!