Kick-off event for UChicago's Literary Arts Lab. Readings by Douglas Kearney, Francisco Cantú, Kristen Radtke.
Register at crwr.eventbrite.com
Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and an Art for Justice fellowship. His writing and translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Best American Essays, Harper’s, and VQR, as well as on This American Life. A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson, where he teaches writing and works to support incarcerated migrants through correspondence and accompaniment programs.
Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and librettist who has published seven books that bridge thematic concerns such as politics, African-American culture, masks, the Trickster figure, and contemporary music. His most recent collection, Sho, aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Kearney is also the author of Buck Studies, which was awarded the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and the silver medal for the California Book Award in Poetry. Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and, was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection; and Patter examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, was named a Notable New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America, and has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem and The Rauschenberg Foundation. His work has appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review, and anthologies, including Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing, and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Poets in America. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family a little west of Minneapolis, MN and teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
Kristen Radtke is the author of the genre-smashing graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This (Pantheon, 2017), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and a Nylon Most Anticipated Book. The Chicago Tribune raved, "Imagine Wanting Only This [is] one of the most haunting graphic memoirs I've ever read. . . . There is a proud tradition of graphic memoirists—of those dually equipped to wield word and image—to tell the true and deeply considered story of a life. Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, Riad Sattouf, David Small, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman and others have done it searingly well. And now to that list add Radtke, who proves herself an equal among equals with this debut book. . . ." Her next book, Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness, received a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. It will be published by Pantheon in 2021. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, The Guardian, GQ, Vogue, Oxford American, and many other places.