Memoir Monday is a collaboration between The Rumpus, Narratively, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub to bring the very best first-person writing together in a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series.
The reading series usually takes place at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn, but we’re observing social distancing rules by holding it on Zoom instead! September’s event took place on Monday, 9/21 and featured readings from Athena Dixon, Sarah Kasbeer, Angela Chen, and Melissa Faliveno. If you missed the live event, you can watch the video below—and then sign up for the Memoir Monday newsletter so you can be sure to catch the next one in real time!
(Please also consider supporting these wonderful writers and The Rumpus by visiting our Bookshop storefront and purchasing their books today!)
You can browse the Memoir Monday book list mentioned in the video here!
About the readers:
A native of Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is the author of The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip Press) and No God in This Room (Argus House Press). Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Athena’s work has appeared in various publications including GAY Magazine and Narratively. She is founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal and is the co-host of the New Books in Poetry podcast via the New Books Network. She resides in Philadelphia.
Sarah Kasbeer‘s essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Cut, Dissent, Elle, Guernica, Longreads, The Rumpus, and the ‘Notables’ section of the Best American Essays. Her first book, A Woman, a Plan, an Outline of a Man, will be published October 1.
Angela Chen is a journalist and the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. Her reporting and essays have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, Paris Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, and more.
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, published last month, which in a starred review Publishers Weekly calls a “winning debut.” The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, her essays and interviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Ms. Magazine, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, and DIAGRAM, among others, and received a notable selection in Best American Essays 2016. She has taught nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Catapult in New York City, and is the 2020-21 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin, she lives in Brooklyn, NY.
About the host:
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger, named one of the “most recommended books of the season” by Literary Hub; and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, forthcoming in 2021. Lilly is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, and her writing has been published by Longreads, The Rumpus, the Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more.
