A moderated Q&A by Rachel Cohen with Jennifer Croft and Aisha Sabatini Sloan on the topic of image and text in craft. Questions will be open to students and the greater audience. Lunch will be provided.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel Amadou (Bloomsbury, 2024), the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards, as well as the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize), Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations, and Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s Two Sherpas. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University.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.
Rachel Cohen is the author of Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (FSG), Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (Yale), and A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of Writers and Artists (Random House), winner of the PEN / Jerard Fund Award. Her essays on artists and writers, on reading and on looking at art, have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Art in America, Apollo Magazine, Lit Hub, McSweeney’s and Best American Essays. Cohen is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work as a public intellectual involves ongoing projects at the 92nd Street Y, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art, the Pozen Center for Human Rights, and A Public Space. She is Professor of Practice in the Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
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.
