Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 9
No matter who we are, parenthood has the power to transform every aspect of our lives. Parenting exacerbates our vulnerabilities while also reawakening our senses of wonder and joy. This panel will feature authors whose work lays bare the complicated realities of present-day parenthood. What does it mean to raise a child within a queer household? What does it mean to become a father to a Black son? How do mothers grapple with desires outside the household?
Featured authors Kristen Arnett (With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things), Joshua Bennett (The Study of Human Life and Owed), and Lynn Steger Strong (Flight and Want) will share their insights and discuss their work. Chelsea Conaboy (journalist and author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood) will facilitate.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Print: A Bookstore.
Kristen Arnett is the author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. Her next book (an untitled collection of short stories) will be published by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House). She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and currently lives in Miami, Florida. You can find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett
Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In 2021, he received the Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction.
Bennett has recited his original works at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.
Bennett’s writing has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of Hold Still and, most recently, of the novel Want. She had a recurring column in The Guardian's “Two in Five” on the disappearing American middle class and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Cut, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and Catapult.
Chelsea Conaboy is a journalist who writes about personal and public health. She was part of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, and her magazine writing has been published by Mother Jones, Politico, the Week, the Boston Globe Magazine, and others. Her first book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, will be published by Henry Holt & Co. in September 2022. She lives in Maine with her husband and their two children.