Monica Huerta of Princeton University hosts this virtual conversation series about contemporary experiments in personal writing. This session features Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez and Tao Leigh Goffe.
This is the fifth program in a six-part series. To register for this program, follow this link.
To launch her new book, "Magical Habits," Princeton University English professor Monica Huerta will host “Personal Limits,” a virtual conversation series about contemporary experiments in personal writing. "Magical Habits," which The New York Times called a “striking debut,” draws on Huerta’s experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, the book stages a dynamic conversation: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it.
Each “Personal Limits” virtual conversation will take up a provocation from "Magical Habits" to think about how contemporary writers are experimenting with the personal and what readers want from personal writing in our moment of overlapping, collective crises. Confirmed series guests include authors, critics, and poets: Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Yomaira Figueroa-Vázquez, Tao Leigh Goffe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tala Khanmalek, Lili Loofbourow, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and Namwali Serpell.
Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez is associate professor of English at Michigan State University and works on 20th century U.S. Latinx Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, and Afro-Hispanic literature and culture. Her current book project, "Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature," focuses on diasporic and exilic Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Equatoguinean texts in context. She is co-founder of the Women of Color Initiatives Project at Michigan State.
Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University, where she also has a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization. She is at work on a book on the ecological poetics and entanglements of the Caribbean plantation. Her second project is a manifesto on digital technology, black feminist praxis and DJ culture called "Pon De Replay."
Monica Huerta is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. Her forthcoming book is "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism."
This series is a collaboration among Labyrinth Books, the Princeton Public Library, and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Humanities Council, and English Department. Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
