F178.
Reunions Revised & Revisited: Writing About (Re)Connecting with Birth Families
Friday, March 25, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Writers who are adopted or otherwise estranged from their biological parents face particularly challenging artistic questions about how familial reconciliation (or lack thereof) can be transformed from raw experience into poems, stories, or essays. These five writers will discuss how they’ve crafted their own experiences facing adoption, parentage, and identity into literary work—and, in doing so, explore the relationship between experience and art and how each informs the other.
Participants
John Gallaher is the author of two chapbooks and five books of poetry, most recently, In a Landscape (2014), as well as coeditor of the Akron Series in Poetics, the Laurel Review, and Time Is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt.
Nari Kirk holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and has work published or forthcoming in Hobart, Poetry Northwest's website, the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing, and elsewhere.
Gary Jackson is author of of origin story and Missing You, Metropolis, which won the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and he coedited the anthology The Future of Black. He teaches in the MFA program at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.
Diana Joseph is the author of the short story collection Happy or Otherwise and the memoir I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for Creative Nonfiction. Joseph teaches at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is the author of Paper Pavilion, Interrogation Room, and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person and Necro Citizens (German, English). A cotranslator of Sami poetry, she is also poetry editor at AGNI and professor of English at St. Olaf College.
