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The Author Events Series presents The Intertextual Self: New Approaches to the Memoir

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Memoirists most often focus on the authenticity of their own voice and experience, and how best to render on the page the intersection of memory and current insight. This traditional approach creates engaging and compelling personal narratives – singular texts of the self. But a new approach seems to be emerging, one in which writers grapple with other texts that have informed their experiences, shaped their thinking, and served as lenses through which to interpret their own lives. This event features three highly accomplished and daring authors who have taken this approach to their memoirs, highlighting how they absorbed other texts and made them integral to telling their own stories. Authors Chris Campanioni (A and B and Also Nothing, 2nd Ed.), Tyler Mills (The Bomb Cloud), and Leah Souffrant (Entanglements) represent a new generation of writers who have turned to an even wider range of texts to help them identify, craft, and share their own stories. Each of their strikingly original memoirs also include visual art created by the authors. 

Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan in 1985 and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. His research connecting media studies with studies of migration has been awarded a Mellon Foundation fellowship and the Calder Prize and his writing has received the International Latino Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. He lives in Brooklyn.

Leah Souffrant makes art, poetry, essays, and criticism. She is the author of Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable. Her recent work can be found in Bone Bouquet, Interim: Poetry and Poetics, Jacket2, Poet Lore, Formes Poétique Contemporaines, Seisma Magazine’s Studio Lab Showcase, and Speak the Magazine. Souffrant has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Center for the Study of Women & Society. She teaches at New York University.

Born in Chicago, Tyler Mills (she/her) is the author of City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, Diode Editions 2021). Her memoir, The Bomb Cloud, received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She lived and taught in New Mexico four years, most recently serving as the Burke Scholar for the Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos, NM, and now teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night.