Art, Craft, and Ethics
Debby Applegate won the Pulitzer for her biography The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, which Publishers Weekly called "an insightful account of a contradictory, fascinating, rather Clintonesque figure who, in many ways, was America's first liberal." Debby is here at UNL today, and before her big lecture tonight, she was kind enough to join several locals for a panel, "The Art, Craft, and Ethics of Biography and Autobiography: A Conversation."
Professor Melissa Homestead put us all together--Walt Whitman scholar Ken Price, Native American historian Victoria Smith, awesome grad student Madeline Wiseman, about whom you've heard before, and me--and gave us some juicy questions, which we round-robinned. We talked for an hour and a half (patient audience!) about issues that overlap for biographers and memoirists.
I got to sit next to Debby (below), who was very interesting and animated. Her doctorate's from Yale, and she's taught at Yale and Wesleyan, but she managed to be broadly accessible to the broad range of faculty and students who came from English, history, and other disciplines to hear her.
It was a good chance to think about the issues--and a nice opportunity for me and Madeline to dry-run some thoughts for our AWP panel next February in Chicago.
And hey! Last night's reading at UNO was great, y'all. Great turnout, great audience, great dinner beforehand with creative writers. I really like what they've got going on over there in Omaha.
Professor Melissa Homestead put us all together--Walt Whitman scholar Ken Price, Native American historian Victoria Smith, awesome grad student Madeline Wiseman, about whom you've heard before, and me--and gave us some juicy questions, which we round-robinned. We talked for an hour and a half (patient audience!) about issues that overlap for biographers and memoirists.
I got to sit next to Debby (below), who was very interesting and animated. Her doctorate's from Yale, and she's taught at Yale and Wesleyan, but she managed to be broadly accessible to the broad range of faculty and students who came from English, history, and other disciplines to hear her.
It was a good chance to think about the issues--and a nice opportunity for me and Madeline to dry-run some thoughts for our AWP panel next February in Chicago.
And hey! Last night's reading at UNO was great, y'all. Great turnout, great audience, great dinner beforehand with creative writers. I really like what they've got going on over there in Omaha.
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