The 2nd Night

Join us for an evening with Irina Dumitrescu (University of Bonn) in conversation with Casandra Garza Reséndez and Camila Roxana Marcone on “Cultivating a Relationship with Yourself as a Writer.”

Preparing for our encounter

We asked our interlocutors to prepare some notes and glosses for us, to help jumpstart our conversation. These are linked below to our partner seminar, Iberian Connections.

• Casandra Garza Reséndez. “Navigating the Perils of Writing.”
• Camila Marcone. “My Interior Monologue about Writing as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Steps of Humility.”

Irina Dumitrescu is a writer and the professor for medieval English literature at the University of Bonn. She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2018) and the editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (Punctum, 2016). Irina is a columnist at the Times Literary Supplement and co-hosts a podcast with Mary Wellesley at the London Review of Books. She also regularly contributes to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, and The Walrus. Her work has been shortlisted for the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for nonfiction, and was reprinted in Best American Essays 2016.

This event is the second night of our series…

Iberian Nights

Book One: Literature and Survival

This series is inspired by the spirit of Sheherazade, Dhuoda, Christine de Pizan, Teresa de Cartagena, the pequeñas mujeres rojas and so many others for whom the practice of literature—in many of its facets—was the matter of survival. They existed in circumstances of physical and sexual violence, of civil war, of racial discrimination, of isolation; they also lived in circumstances that cannot be properly expressed outside their own experiments with literature.

Our guests write from many directions, for many audiences, for many souls. Novels, reviews, the lives of afrodescendent people, dance, race, sexual violences, asylum briefs, and so many other forms of polyhedric writing that explore the limits of literature—and those of survival. They will be in conversation about their work, about their thought and, certainly, about the joys and frustrations of the literary worlds they inhabit. To see our full Fall schedule, please visit our Iberian Nights page..