We’re very pleased to present a double-bill of new and scintillating essay collections from two of the most dynamic and exciting writers presently working, Joanna Eleftheriou and Michele Morano. We’re especially pleased to welcome back Joanna, who lived in Columbia while pursuing a post-graduate degree in English at the University of Missouri.
To register for this event (it’s free, as always!) go here.
Joanna Eleftheriou is an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University, a contributing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and a faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece. Her essays, short stories, and translations appear regularly in journals including Apalachee Review, Chautauqua, CutBank, Arts and Letters, andThe Common. Based in Hampton Roads, Virgina, she regularly spends time in New York, Cyprus, and Greece. Kirkus gave her debut essay collection, This Way Back, a starred review, calling it a “winning and contemplative,” and a “ fine collection of essays on identity, at once wide-ranging and site-specific.”
Michele Morano is the author of the books Like Love and Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, and of essays published in Best American Essays; WaveForm: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women; I'll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program; Between Song and Story: Essays from the Twenty-First Century; and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. Her short work has appeared in literary journals including Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, Brevity, Rusted Radishes, Fourth River, Georgia Review, and Missouri Review. She has received honors and awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Association of University Women, among others. Michele holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She is a professor and current chair of the English Department at DePaul University and lives in Chicago with her long-term partner, their old-soul son, and two very bossy cats.
A memoir-in-essays about unconsummated romance, Like Love tells the stories we tend to avoid, about improper crushes and infatuations that go nowhere because the goal is less physical union than psychological provocation. Michele Morano interweaves adult episodes with adolescent stories of her family’s breakup, tracing the way we learn and revise our understandings of romantic love. Poignant, funny, insightful, and unsettling, Like Love challenges our understandings of attraction, commitment, and parenthood, while reminding us of the transformative pleasure of desire.
Credit: Kyle Bondeson
