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! August’s event took place on Monday, 8/17 and featured readings from Billy-Ray Belcourt, Rose Andersen, Damon Young, and Alisson Wood. 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:
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His books are This Wound Is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms, and A History of My Brief Body.
Rose Andersen is the author of The Heart and Other Monsters. She received her MFA in writing at California Institute of the Arts, where she was awarded the Emi Kuriyama Thesis Prize. Her essays have appeared in The Cut, Glamour, and elsewhere.
Damon Young is the author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker—winner of Barnes & Noble’s 2019 Discover Award. He’s also a founder of VerySmartBrothas and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
Alisson Wood’s essays have been published in the New York Times, Catapult, and Epiphany. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University. Alisson teaches creative writing at her alma mater and at Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the founder and Editor in Chief of Pigeon Pages, a NYC literary journal and reading series. Alisson was a winner of the inaugural Breakout 8 Award from Epiphany Magazine and the Author’s Guild. Being Lolita is her first book.
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.
