S177.
Wanting: Women Writing about Desire
Saturday, March 11, 2023
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
In an intimate and daring new anthology of essays—Wanting: Women Writing about Desire (Catapult 2023)—thirty-three award-winning and emerging writers from a range of experiences and backgrounds explore the changing face of female desire. In this panel, three contributors and the collection’s coeditors discuss the risks and rewards of exposure in nonfiction, why committing to the page is a feminist act, and the ways in which writing desire helped them tackle the complicated knot of it.
Participants
Margot Kahn is the author of the biography Horses That Buck, which won the High Plains Book Award, and coeditor of two anthologies—This Is the Place: Women Writing about Home, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and Wanting: Women Writing about Desire (Catapult, February 2023).
Sonora Jha is the author of the novels The Laughter (Harper Via, 2023) and Foreign (Random House, 2013) and the memoir-in-essays How to Raise a Feminist Son (Sasquatch/PRH, 2021). Her essays are in the New York Times, Seattle Times, DAME, and others. She is a professor of journalism at Seattle University.
Rena Priest is a poet and an enrolled member of the Lummi Nation. She has been appointed to serve as Washington State Poet Laureate for the term of April 2021–2023. Priest has published two collections of poetry and is the recipient of an Allied Arts Professional Poets Award.
Kristen Arnett is the queer author of the novel With Teeth, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Fiction, and the author of the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things. She lives and works in Florida.
Nicole Hardy is the author of two poetry collections and the memoir Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin. She’s best known for her Modern Love essay “Single, Female, Mormon, Alone,” later featured on the podcast and noted in Best American Essays 2012. She earned an MFA from Bennington College.
