#ArtLitPhx: ASU Creative Writing Presents Jess Row

#ArtLitPhx: ASU Creative Writing Presents Jess Row

The Creative Writing Program at ASU presents author Jess Row in a reading from his work, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, followed by a Q&A and book signing. Free of charge and open to the public, the event will take place September 17, 2019 at 7pm in Ross-Blakley Hall 117 on ASU’s Tempe Campus (1102 S McAllister Ave, Tempe, AZ 85281).

The featured work White Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. Jess Row ties “white flight”—the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns—to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes. In doing so, Row asserts, those white writers (including Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace) have constructed a creative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race. Not all hope is lost, however–Row explores what it would mean should writers “approach each other again”, and analyzes previous portrayals of interracial relationships with the aim of further inclusion in fiction.

In addition to White Flights, Row has also written the novels Your Face in Mine and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets LostWhite Flights is his first book of nonfiction, while his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2007, he lives in New York and teaches at the College of New Jersey.

#ArtLitPhx: Brown Bag Series: Examining Whiteness through Art

Brown-Bag-seriesJoin the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy for a conversation with Dr. Chris Boyd. Bring your lunch at noon and be ready for an hour of discussion exploring the intersection between art, psychology, and transformative social change. Boyd explores how a socially engaged imagination can be used to confront common notions of whiteness and create a paradigm shift.

This is part of the CSRD “Impact Arizona” series. Co-hosted by ASU’s Project Humanities.

Chris Boyd received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Arizona State University, a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from California State University Long Beach, and a Ph.D. in Psychology, with a specialization in Transformative Social Change from Saybrook University in Oakland, CA.  He is the founder and CEO of VelNonArt, a Tempe based nonprofit organization focused on transforming youth and communities through art.

The event takes place on Tuesday, September 20th from 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Arizona State University Downtown Phoenix. Mercado C, Room 145. 502 E. Monroe Street. Phoenix, AZ. Please visit the ASU page for more information, and you can register here.