Conversation will be based on two readings. Contact Micah Perks at meperks@ucsc.edu to request reading selections.

Additional Event: Public reading by Sarah Manguso and Maggie Nelson in the UCSC Living Writers Series, Thursday May 28, Humanities Lecture Hall

Free and open to the public.

The Complicated Labor Research Cluster is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together artists and scholars around questions of feminism, maternity, and creative process. It seeks to center questions of care in our research and art whether they are explicit sites of inspiration and study or simply important to
the conditions in which we undertake expressive practices.

Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Her five other books include The Guardians, named one of the top ten books of the year by Salon, and The Two Kinds of Decay, named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of the Year by the Independent, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Telegraph, and Time Out Chicago. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize.

Maggie Nelson is the author of five books of nonfiction and four books of poetry. Her most recent book is The Argonauts, a work of “auto-theory” about gender, sexuality, sodomitical maternity, queer family, and the limitations and possibilities of language. Her 2011 book of art and cultural criticism, The Art of Cruelty: A
Reckoning, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editors’ Choice. Her other nonfiction books include the cult hit Bluets. Recent awards include a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 Innovative Literature grant from Creative Capital.