Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, Whip Smart, Abandon Me, and Body Work, will be speaking at the Spurlock Museum on Thursday, March 23rd. Her visit is sponsored by the Kaplan Family Writer-in-Residence Series, the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois, and the Spurlock Museum.
The reading will be followed by a Q&A session.
From her bio:
Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the nationally bestselling essay collection, GIRLHOOD, which is a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and named a notable book of 2021 by NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and others. Her craft book, BODY WORK (2022), is also a national bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, and an Indie Next Pick.
The recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, Melissa’s work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.
Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and The Center for Women Writers at Salem College. She is a four-time MacDowell fellow and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute at The Camargo Foundation, The Ragdale Foundation, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which named her the 2018 recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writing Award.
She co-curated the Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan for ten years and served on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts for five. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
Here’s a sense of what you can expect:
Melissa Febos
Knight Auditorium
Spurlock Museum
600 S Gregory
Urbana
Th Mar 23rd, 4:30 p.m.
Free
