Anne Boleyn gets her head cut off... and calmly sews it back on. Hans Christian Andersen arrives at Dickens’s country house and becomes the awkward guest from hell. Jordan Baker, reimagined as a queer, Vietnamese, adopted immigrant, steps out from the margins of The Great Gatsby into a glittering world of magic, money, and menace. In the hands of Rebecca Lehmann, Francine Prose, and Nghi Vo, history is not fixed, polite, or safely behind glass. It can be scrambled, haunted, queered, rerouted, and made strange again. This is fiction that refuses to leave the past alone. A conversation about speculative history, retelling, literary trespass, and the instability of time itself.
Date
Jun 20, 11:30am to 12:30pm
Featuring
Rebecca Lehmann
Rebecca Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize (selected by Ross Gay); and The Sweating Sickness. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College.
Francine Prose
Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include 1974: A Person History, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Nghi Vo
Nghi Vo is the bestselling author of Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful, and The City in Glass, as well as the acclaimed Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Lambda Literary, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, and has won the Hugo, Crawford, and Ignyte Awards. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.
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