Places I’ve Taken My Body Molly McCully Brown and Leslie Jamison
Event details
Poet Molly McCully Brown n conversation with author Leslie Jamison explores living within and beyond the limits of a body - in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder.
Hear how in spite of - indeed, in response to - physical constraints, Molly has travelled widely from the rural American South of her childhood to the cobblestoned streets of Bologna, Italy. She’ll also discuss the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry.
Drawing on her book, Places I’ve Taken My Body, she will depict vividly not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the world’s oldest anatomical theatre, the American Eugenics movement, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
Join Molly as she offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences, woven together in consideration, always, of what it means to be human - flawed, potent, feeling.
Molly will be in conversation with the New York Times best-selling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison.
This event is hosted live on Zoom Webinar. You’ll receive a link to join a couple of days before the event takes place and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
About the speaker
Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body, and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. With Susannah Nevision, she is also the co-author of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us. The recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She teaches at Old Dominion University in Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Nonfiction.
Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is the New York Times best-selling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic,Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She directs the graduate non-fiction programme at Columbia University.
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