S124.
Retrograde Radical: Marilynne Robinson's Cosmic Realism
Saturday, March 26, 2022
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Four innovative novelists, all seasoned fiction workshop leaders, discuss how Robinson achieves her remarkable effects, engaging women's and men's lives, race, Christianity, and American cultural history in novels simultaneously unadorned and complicated, regional and universal, and reminding us that novelists can be our public intellectuals. Panelists will tease out how Robinson does what she does and what we can learn from this work, with insights for both pedagogy and our own writing.
Participants
Ted Pelton has authored five fiction titles, numerous articles and reviews, and over fifty published stories, including in BOMB and Brooklyn Rail. An NEA Literature Fellow in fiction and the former director of Starcherone Books, he directs the creative writing program at Tennessee Tech University.
Elisabeth Sheffield is the author of four novels, most recently Ire Land (a Faery Tale), and one critical book. She is the recipient of a 2012 NEA Award for Literature and a 2014 Fulbright at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, and she was a 2016/2017 writer in residence at the Hanse Institute in Germany.
Aimee Parkison is the author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, which won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and has published five books of fiction.
Michael James Rizza is the author of the novel Cartilage and Skin and a monograph about Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault, along with various works of short fiction and academic articles. He is an associate professor of creative writing and the department chair at Eastern New Mexico University.
