F117.
Patchwork Identities: Hybrid Memoirs by Writers of Color
Friday, March 10, 2023
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Most memoirs take readers on a journey through a steady, singular voice. But writers with complicated life stories and layered identities (BIPOC, mixed race, marginalized) aren’t always served by conventional story structure. Much like the hit film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, hybrid memoirs stitch together multiple realities, voices, and aesthetic approaches, stretching the boundaries of autobiographical storytelling to convey the polyphonic brilliance of their experiences.
Participants
Grace Loh Prasad received her MFA in creative writing from Mills College and is an alumna of VONA. Her essays have appeared in Catapult, Ninth Letter, The Manifest-Station, Cha, and Hedgebrook Journal. She is currently working on a memoir/essay collection entitled The Translator’s Daughter.
Ella deCastro Baron authored Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment, a hybrid memoir about being a child of Filipino immigrants, inherited sickness, and faith. An embodied storyteller and teacher, Ella produces and cofacilitates decolonial, antiracist gatherings that nourish people and communities.
Jen Soong received her MFA in creative writing from UC Davis and is an alum of Tin House and VONA. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Audacity, Jellyfish Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Waxwing. Her memoir-in-progress is a reckoning of myth, migration and memory.
Jackson Bliss is the mixed-race/hapa author of Amnesia of June Bugs, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, Dream Pop Origami, and the speculative hypertext, Dukkha, My Love. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, and Columbia Journal. He lives in L.A.
