What fills you with awe? What fills you with doubt? What bewilders, fascinates, or astonishes you about the enterprise of turning affective worlds into literary forms? As noun, as verb, as metaphysical state, what is wonder's role in the creation of art?
This panel, introduced by Robyn Schiff and moderated by Nick Twemlow, serves as the kick-off event for the Literary Arts Lab: Art & Wonder. Arda Collins, Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Joy Harjo will discuss this spring's festival theme.
Arda Collins is the author of Star Lake (The Song Cave, 2022), long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award, and It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by Louise Glück. She is a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Apart from her work as a writer and a teacher, she has also been an associate producer for the PBS documentary series Frontline and American Experience. She teaches at Smith College.
Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two novels translated into thirty-four languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.” His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade. Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO. Hernan Diaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. Diaz holds a PhD from NYU, edits an academic journal at Columbia University, and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity. For more information on Diaz, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). My Lesbian Novel, a work of fiction and autobiography, is forthcoming in 2024. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.
In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position and only the second person to serve three terms in the role. Harjo’s ten books of poetry include Weaving Sundown in a Scarlett Light, An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. She is also the author of two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, which invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. She has edited several anthologies of Native American writing including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, and Living Nations, Living Words, the companion anthology to her signature poet laureate project. Her many writing awards include the 2022 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2019 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally; her most recent album is I Pray For My Enemies. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Literary Arts Lab: Art and Wonder is a two-day festival of public readings, panels, craft talks, and Q&As featuring writers Arda Collins, Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Joy Harjo in conversation with UChicago faculty, students, and community members. Join us as we explore the intersections between art, wonder, imagination, and writing craft. Free and open to everyone.
Presented in partnership with the Poetry and the Human Core; the Department of English Language and Literature; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Committee on Social Thought; the Division of the Humanities; and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores