51社区

Esteemed nonfiction writer  will visit 51社区 for the 2023 Spring Literary Festival, with free public readings and lectures on March 29-30.

Borich is the author of four books of lyric memoir and the recipient of the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, an IPPY (the Independent Publisher Book Award) Gold Medal in Creative Nonfiction, a Foreward INDIE Book of the Year Bronze, The Florida Review Editor鈥檚 Prize in the Essay, and the Crab Orchard Review Literary Nonfiction Prize.

Three of these honors were showered on Borich鈥檚 third book, (University of Nebraska Press/American Lives Series, 2013), which a Kirkus starred review called 鈥減oetic, complex, and innovative鈥濃�斺�渁 stunningly original memoir that explores a woman鈥檚 connection to the real and imagined Midwestern landscapes that have defined her life.鈥� A self-described 鈥渂oho-femme-lesbian-creative-nonfiction-writer鈥� who grew up on the industrial South Side of Chicago, Borich sees as a 鈥渜uirky attempt at counter-mapping my American body against 鈥榯he true and accurate atlas鈥� any woman of my place and generation was supposed to follow.鈥�

Her 1999 memoir, : Landscapes of a Marriage (Graywolf Press) is regarded as a queer classic. Describing Borich鈥檚 second book in a Lambda Literary essay, Julie Enszer says, 鈥淢y Lesbian Husband situates lesbian relationships in a complicated, messy world of long-term intimacy. While the title heralds lesbianism as its center, the book explores broader, human questions about relationships . . . [centering] attention at the margin to illuminate a whole.鈥�

Of her own work, Borich says, 鈥淚 don鈥檛 write to argue or to narrate so much as to listen, illuminate, and wander.鈥� She enjoys the capaciousness and queerness of creative nonfiction, a genre she sees as 鈥渁ttentive to form but difficult to classify, with quirky yet intentionally designed exteriors, slippery rules, a mutating understanding of identity, a commitment to getting past the b------- and making unexpected connections, and a grounding in an unmasked, yet lyric, voice.鈥�

Borich鈥檚 most recent book, (Ohio State University Press: Mad Creek Books/Machete Series in Literary Nonfiction, 2018) is a lyric narrative that critics say 鈥渟oars and seems to live as a new form altogether.鈥� PopMatters calls it 鈥減oetry, a meditation on life as 鈥榯he other,鈥� creative non-fiction, and abstract art.鈥�

Paul Lisicky, writing in the , agrees: "Apocalypse, Darling refuses easy categories. It is a book about growing up in Chicago鈥檚 little-known industrial suburbs, it is a book about whiteness, a book of relationships, a book of ruin. It is both love letter and song of warning.... Through form, Borich implies that nothing is separate, everyone is included, implicated, active, doomed, simultaneous. And if that鈥檚 the way it is, what kind of world do we want?"

For Borich, formal innovation is not merely an aesthetic imperative but a sociopolitical one. 鈥淣ostalgia is for funerals and inventive change is the only way forward,鈥� she writes in a craft essay invoking a "queer literary aesthetic:"

Writing as resistance to the notion that the ways we were (silent, stratified, ostracized, victimized, hidden) could possibly be better than the way we are now (still some of these things, some of the time, but not always, and not everywhere) and the ways we might become (always remaking, redefining, becoming more just and creatively fluid)....

Queerness as a literary perspective, as well as a joyful way of living, came about as an antidote to oppression and hatred, but also because a people who were different in body and affections from the mainstream started talking to each other, and loving each other, and forming communities out of which they made homes, services, and art with one another.

Borich is a professor in the English Department and MFA/MA in Writing and Publishing Program, and Director of the LGBTQ Studies minor, at DePaul University in Chicago, where she edits , a journal of the urban essay arts.

Borich鈥檚 work has appeared in Ecotone, The Seneca Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, Passages North, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, and other literary journals and has been anthologized in Critical Creative Writing; Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women; and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays.

Spring 2023 Literary Festival Schedule

Wednesday, March 29

7:30 p.m. Barrie Jean Borich lecture

8:30 p.m. Denise Duhamel reading

Thursday, March 30

10 a.m.: Megan Giddings lecture

11 a.m.: Denise Duhamel lecture

5 p.m.: Barrie Jean Borich reading

6 p.m.: Megan Giddings reading

See more Spring Literary Festival news.