Memoir Monday is a collaboration between The Rumpus, Narratively, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Longreads 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! June’s event took place on Monday, 6/15 and featured readings from Matt Ortile, Jessica Pearce Rotondi, Meredith Taluson, and Marcia Trahan. 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:
Marcia Trahan is a native Vermonter, a freelance book editor, a semiprofessional patient, and the author of Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession, out this month from Barrelhouse Books. Marcia’s essays and poetry have appeared in Fourth Genre, Blood Orange Review, Connotation Press, Kansas City Voices, and the LaChance Publishing anthology Women Reinvented: True Stories of Empowerment and Change.
Matt Ortile is the author of The Groom Will Keep His Name, an essay collection about sex, power, and the model minority myth, out this month from Bold Type Books. He’s also the managing editor of Catapult magazine and a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Previously, he was the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. He’s written for BuzzFeed Reader, Out, Into, Vogue, Self, and Details, among others.
Jessica Pierce Rotondi is the author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers, which came out this spring from Unnamed Press. Jessica’s work has been published by The History Channel, Vogue, Reader’s Digest, Salon, Atlas Obscura, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Refinery29. Previously, she was a senior editor at The Huffington Post and a staff member at PEN America.
Meredith Talusan is the author of Fairest, out this spring from Viking, and an award-winning author and journalist who has written for The Guardian, the New York Times, the Atlantic, The Nation, WIRED, SELF, and Condé Nast Traveler, among many other publications, and has contributed to several essay collections. She has received awards from GLAAD, The Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She is also the founding executive editor of them., Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ digital platform, where she is currently contributing editor.
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.
