Literary Arts Lab: Alternative Archives

October 22, 2022 4:00PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Penthouse

How might archival documents be used to challenge dominant narratives? How does research fuel experimentation in the alternative stories these writers tell? A panel with Eula Biss, John Keene and Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Moderated by Tina Post. Refreshments provided.

Eula Biss is the author of four books: Having and Being Had (2020), On Immunity (2014), Notes from No Man’s Land (2009), and The Balloonists (2002). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. As a 2023 National Fellow at New America, she is at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world.

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), which received a 2022 Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and is longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Prize; and Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), which received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She is the author of The Fluency of Light, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Borealis, and, with her father, the image + text collaboration, Captioning the Archives. The recipient of a CLMP Firecraker award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a National Magazine Award, a Lambda Literary award, and a Jean Córdova award for Queer Nonfiction. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.

Tina Post is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department of the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses for Creative Writing, Theatre and Performance Studies, and the Center for Race, Politics, and Culture. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Alaska–Anchorage and her PhD in African American Studies from Yale University. Both her scholarship and artistic works explore the effects of formal or performative decisions in communicating—or in failing to communicate—position, affect, and identity. Tina’s first book project, Deadpan Aesthetics in Black Expressive Culture, examines expressionlessness and affective withholding in a range of black cultural and artistic sites. Her scholarly work can be found in TDR/The Drama Review, and is forthcoming in Modern Drama and Time Signatures (Duke University Press). Her creative work has appeared in The Appendix and in Stone Canoe, where it won the S.I. Newhouse School Prize for Nonfiction.

Literary Arts Lab is a three-day festival of readings, panels, and Q&As featuring writers Eula Biss, Jennifer Croft, John Keene, Suketu Mehta, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan.

This event is sponsored by UChicago’s Program in Creative Writing and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

 

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