Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 8
For close to two decades, National Magazine Award winner Rebecca Traister (author of Good and Mad and a writer-at-large for New York Magazine) has covered women in politics, media, and entertainment. Recently, her work has centered female anger and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Rebecca will be joined in conversation by Kerri Arsenault, whose investigative memoir Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction. Rebecca and Kerri will have a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to write nonfiction as a woman in this political, cultural, and environmental moment in which it feels like so many things are on fire (and some things literally are). Susan Conley, author of five critically-acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction (including Landslide and Elsey Come Home), will moderate.
This event is co-sponsored by the Portland Public Library, the Maine Women Writers Collection, and Mechanics Hall.
This event is free, and RSVP is required. Please click the button above to reserve your seat.
Books will be sold by Longfellow Books.
Kerri Arsenault is co-founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University (TESS), contributing editor at Orion magazine, book critic, and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Mill Town was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and top book pick for the Chicago Tribune, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews, Oprah magazine, People, Newsweek, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
For 2022–2023, Arsenault will be a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, where she will be working on two biography projects that orbit around her primary interest: the lives of ordinary people and their intersection with waste, pollutants, and toxicities.
Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine. A National Magazine Award winner, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies, both New York Times best-sellers, and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry.
Susan Conley is the author of five critically-acclaimed books, including her newest, best-selling novel Landslide — A New York Times “Editor’s Choice”, a TODAY Show “Summer Read,” a “Best Book” by Good Morning America, The New York Post, Medium, Bustle, Biblio Lifestyle and others, as well as a Maine NPR Bookclub Pick. Her previous, best-selling novel, Elsey Come Home, was a Most Anticipated/Best Book at Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire, Pop Sugar, Huffington Post, Southern Living, Fodors, and an “Editor’s Choice” at Amazon. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Lithub, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, and others. She’s been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She's won the Maine Book Award and the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence and has been a featured Tedx Speaker, where her talk the "Power of Story," has been viewed widely. She’s taught at colleges and international art-residencies including Emerson College, Colby College, The University of Massachusetts, as the Jack Kerouac Visiting Fellow, The Haystack School, The Spannochia Foundation, La Napoule Foundation, and The Beijing Hutong. She’s on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program and is co-founder of the Telling Room, a creative writing lab for kids in Portland, Maine.