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 it moved online during the pandemic. June’s event took place on Monday, 6/21 and featured readings from Anjali Enjeti, Lilly Dancyger, Larissa Pham, and Krys Malcolm Belc. If you missed the live event—the last all-virtual Memoir Monday reading!—you can watch the video below (and sign up for the Memoir Monday newsletter so you can 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!)
About the readers:
Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and award-winning journalist based near Atlanta. Her collection of essays, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and her debut novel, The Parted Earth, were published this spring. Her writing about politics, social justice, and books has appeared in Harper’s BAZAAR, ZORA, Courier Newsroom, Mic, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her work has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. A graduate of Duke University, Washington University School of Law, and the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, she teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University.
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books—and the host of the Memoir Monday reading series. She’s the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press. Her writing has been published by Longreads, BOMB, Guernica, Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more.
Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. She has written essays and criticism for the Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, Guernica, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Her debut essay collection, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy, was published by Catapult in May. She is also the author of Fantasian, a novella.
Krys Malcolm Belc’s work has appeared in Granta, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in Kensington, Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children. His debut memoir, The Natural Mother of the Child, was published by Counterpoint in June.
About this month’s special guest host:
Marisa Siegel holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the anthology Burn It Down (Seal Press, 2019), and her debut poetry chapbook, Fixed Stars, is forthcoming from Burrow Press in March 2022. She is editor-in-chief and owner of The Rumpus. Follow her on Twitter at @marisasaystweet.
