T192.
Dazzling Multiplicity of the Actual: Nonfiction Hybridity & Intersectional Form
Thursday, February 8, 2024
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
Conventional approaches to nonfiction emphasize single stories, linear revelations, and verifiable facts, but pressure to conform to familiar narrative modalities can silence those who write from marginalized and non-normative perspectives. In this panel, five writers of hybrid and intersectional nonfiction discuss how their work disrupts norms, shatters singular narratives, and complicates facts—embracing instead the power of blended genres, multiple identities, and prismatic points of view.
Participants
Barrie Jean Borich is the author of the lyric memoir Apocalypse, Darling. Her hybrid essay Body Geographic won a Lambda Literary Award, and her memoir My Lesbian Husband won a Stonewall Book Award. A professor at DePaul in Chicago, Borich edits Slag Glass City, a journal of the urban essay arts.
Jen Soriano (she/they) is a Filipinx writer who has received Artist Trust, Jack Jones, Hugo House, and Vermont Studio Center fellowships. Her debut essay collection Nervous, named one of the best nonfiction debuts of 2023 by Poets & Writers, is now available from Amistad/HarperCollins.
Julie Marie Wade's most recent collections are Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House 2023), Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram/ New Michigan Press, 2023), and Skirted: Poems (The Word Works, 2021). She is a professor of English and creative writing at Florida International University in Miami.
Constance Collier-Mercado is an experimental writer and artist whose work explores dialectical, multilingual, and equivocal spaces. A MacDowell, Hambidge Center, and Jack Jones Fellow based in Atlanta, she is influenced by the Black Arts Movement, cycles of repetition and revision, and the Afrosurreal.
Marco Wilkinson is an assistant professor of literary arts and cultural studies in the literature department at UC San Diego. His focus is on creative nonfiction and eco-writing. He is the author of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds and his work has appeared in Ecotone, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.
