Joyelle McSweeney reading with Olga Ravn at Barnard

Don’t miss Joyelle McSweeney reading with Olga Ravn at Barnard this Tuesday, April 16th at 6:30pm

The Barnard Creative Writing Program presents Olga Ravn and Joyelle McSweeney discussing playful new works about motherhood as abjection, madness, and body horror. International Booker Finalist Ravn follows her anti-capitalist space opera The Employees with her new book, My Work, which mixes diary, novel, and poetry to tell the story of a doom-scrolling new mother who buys clothes she can’t afford and finally forces herself to read and write. Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne told a baroque elegy for her daughter that imagined the lyric as toxin. Her new book Death Styles sublimates her grief through poems exploring icons like Mary Magdalene, Terminator 2, and a cast from a goth fairy tale: dead swans, the moms of the underworld, and the poison daughters. Brilliant and terrifying, both writers ferociously capture the most nightmare of pregnancy and childbirth. In conversation with Associate Director of Creative Writing Ken Chen. Reserve a seat on Eventbrite here.