S189.
Overexposure: How Memoirists Protect Their Privacy
Saturday, March 26, 2022
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
This panel will explore the counterintuitive subject of privacy in a form that demands divulgence. How can we tell the "whole" truth without including everything? How do we negotiate dueling loyalties to an important story and to loved ones? What devices can a nonfiction writer use to withhold or conceal things? And how do some craft choices reflect the burden placed on certain populations to perform vulnerability? Finally, how can memoirists retain privacy in the social media stratosphere?
Participants
Courtney Zoffness is the author of the memoir Spilt Milk. She won the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, as well as fellowships from the Center for Fiction and MacDowell. She directs the creative writing program at Drew University.
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collection Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He teaches at Rice University and at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
T Kira Mahealani Madden is a lesbian, APIA author of New York Times Editors' Choice memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and founding editor in chief of No Tokens. Winner of the 2021 Lambda Judith A. Markowitz Award, she is an assistant professor at College of Charleston.
Gina Frangello is the author of the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, as well as four books of fiction: Every Kind of Wanting, A Life in Men, Slut Lullabies, and My Sister's Continent. She is the creative nonfiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).
