A reading and conversation with Lacy M. Johnson
Speaker
Author of The Reckonings and Professor at Rice UniversityDate & time
Location
Free and open to the public. Reception and book signing to follow.
This event will be livestreamed. Check back here just before the event for viewing details.
Join us for a reading by Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings and professor of creative nonfiction at Rice University. David Morse, Lecturer at the Ford School's Writing Center, will moderate.
The Reckonings is a collection of essays that pursues questions of justice, sexual violence, and retribution. Johnson draws from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and other fields, as well as her own personal experience, to consider how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.
From the speaker's bio:
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of The Reckonings, which was named a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Criticism and one of the best books of 2018 by Boston Globe, Electric Literature, Autostraddle, Book Riot, and Refinery 29. She is also author of The Other Side. For its frank and fearless confrontation of the epidemic of violence against women, The Other Side was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; it was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer Selection for 2014, and was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus, Library Journal, and the Houston Chronicle. She is also author of Trespasses: A Memoir, which has been anthologized in The Racial Imaginary and Literature: The Human Experience.
She worked as a cashier at WalMart, sold steaks door-to-door, and puppeteered with a traveling children’s museum before earning a PhD from University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she was both an Erhardt Fellow and Inprint Fondren Fellow. As a writer and artist, she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Houston Endowment, Rice University's Humanities Research Center, Houston Arts Alliance, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission (may it rest in peace), the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Sentence, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.
Cosponsored by: The Department of English Language & Literature, Women and Gender in Public Policy