S187.
Show (Me), Don’t Tell: Missouri Writers Grappling with the State of Their State
Saturday, February 10, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Missouri has recently made a dramatic turn toward repressive social policy, raising difficult questions for the state’s writers: how do I love a place that doesn’t love me back? How can I acknowledge Missouri’s rich literary history and use writing to address the current crisis? How can writing become part of the solution to the state’s problems? In this panel, five Missouri writers discuss their struggles to love and critique their home as they hope for its future renewal.
Participants
Caleb Tankersley is the author of Sin Eaters—winner of the Permafrost Book Prize—and the chapbook Jesus Works the Night Shift. A 2023 Fiction Fellow at Bread Loaf, Caleb is the managing director for Split/Lip Press and is currently working on his first novel.
Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and author of several poetry collections, most recently The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and Fountain and Furnace. She is also coauthor of Writing Poems. Bar-Nadav is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Samantha Edmonds is the author of the chapbooks Pretty to Think So (Selcouth Station Press, 2019) and The Space Poet (Split/Lip Press, 2020). Her work appears in the New York Times, Gay Magazine, Ninth Letter, and The Rumpus, among others. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she's a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri.
Ron A. Austin's first collection of linked stories, Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar has received several honors including: The 2017 Nilsen Prize, a 2019 Foreward INDIES Gold Award, a 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize nomination, and a 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nomination.
Phong Nguyen is the author of Bronze Drum, Roundabout, The Adventures of Joe Harper, Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, and Memory Sickness. He edited two books: one on author Nancy Hale and the Best Peace Fiction anthology. He teaches creative writing at the University of Missouri.
