Featuring: V.V. Ganeshananthan and Buki Papillon

Moderator: Faramola Shonekan

As first-generation and second-generation immigrants, Buki Papillon and V.V. Ganeshananthan are Americans writing back to their roots (in Nigeria and Sri Lanka respectively.) In this dialogue between two exciting literary voices, a wide-ranging conversation will touch upon social and cultural change in their countries of origin and what it is like to represent and evoke people and places familiar to them but foreign to many of their readers.

Moderator: Sam Cohen, University of Missouri Department of English

Lydia Millet is one of the most acclaimed fiction writers of her generation. The author of more than a dozen novels and short story collections, every new book is a cause for celebration and is a fixture on that year’s “Best Of” lists. But that’s not all – she’s also a prolific writer of essays, reviews, opinion pieces, and “other ephemera.”

Featuring: Jennifer Maritza McCauley and Dani Shapiro

Moderator: Caylin Capra Thomas

Writing is hard. Writing well is harder. Writing to stunningly high standards in more than one genre is so difficult that the few who can do it are, yes, literary unicorns. Dani Shapiro is a beloved memoirist and an acclaimed novelist. Jennifer Maritza McCauley had already published a well-received poetry collection when her debut book of short stories, When Trying to Return Home, was published last year to immense buzz. What is it that allows these two writers to excel in multiple different forms, and how do the different skills required for each inform the other?

Danny Caine, acclaimed poet and co-owner of Raven Book Store in Lawrence, KS, has been an outspoken critic of the seemingly unstoppable Goliath of the bookselling world: Amazon. In How To Resist Amazon and Why, he lays out the case for shifting our personal money and civic investment away from global corporate behemoths and to small, local, independent businesses. And he spells out a clear path to resistance, in a world where consumers are struggling to get by. Danny will be in conversation with fellow writer and bookstore owner, Alex George.

Moderator: Alexandra Socarides

Kerri Arsenault’s acclaimed memoir, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains has met with tremendous critical acclaim since its publication. In addition to being a sharp and beautiful book of memoir and history, Mill Town is a spirited call-to-arms, a rallying cry for a true accounting of the costs – environmental, health, economic, and otherwise – that industries exact on the often impoverished communities that depend upon them for their survival.

Panelists: David Berry and Julie Schumacher

Moderator: Phong Nguyễn

Getting the solitary reader to laugh is harder than it seems. Those who incorporate humor in literary writing must often do so without undercutting its ambition or earnestness. These three writers discuss the challenge of being enduringly funny.

Panelists: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brehyah and Sequoia Nagamatsu

Moderators: Whitney Terrell and Sugi Ganeshananthan

“High” art and “low” art, “literary” and “popular” fiction—these distinctions have been dissolving as mainstream entertainment becomes more complex and sophisticated in its aesthetic range, so that trying to separate that which is written for the tastes of an elite and that which is written for the tastes of the masses becomes a harder and harder (and more and more meaningless) task. In this author conversation, two writers who embrace pop culture and literary culture discuss how both influence their art.

Panelists: Eric Nguyen and Shanthi Sekaran

Moderator: Elijah Guerra

The immigrant story in all its variations has been a rich source of inspiration for writers for centuries. Eric Nguyen and Shanthi Sekaran have written beautiful novels that explore the many tensions and complications inherent in the immigration experience. How much do you leave behind, and how much do you take with you? They’ll be discussing how they took the universal tale that built this country, and made it their own.

Panelists: Steve Paul, Henry Schvey

Moderator: Whitney Terrell

In the pantheon of celebrated writers with connections to the Show-Me State, Evan S. Connell and Tennessee Williams appear in many ways to be opposites. One lived in Kansas City, one in St. Louis. One was a novelist; one a playwright. One never achieved the recognition he deserved; one was one of the most celebrated names in the literary world. And then there is also a strange point of connection: both had movies made of their work starring Paul Newman. Their biographers, Steve Paul and Henry Schvey, discuss the writers’ work and legacy and Missouri connections.

Sponsored by the University of Missouri Press