REUNION

Author(s):
Hannah Pittard
Book summary:

Five minutes before her flight is set to take off, Kate Pulaski, failed screenwriter and newly failed wife with scarcely a hundred dollars to her name, learns that her estranged father has killed himself. More shocked than saddened by the news, she gives in to her siblings' request that she join them, along with her many half-siblings and most of her father's five former wives, in Atlanta, their birthplace, for a final farewell.



Written with huge heart and bracing wit, REUNION takes place over the following four days, as family secrets are revealed, personal foibles are exposed, and Kate-an inveterate liar looking for a way to come clean-slowly begins to acknowledge the overwhelming similarities between herself and the man she never thought she'd claim as an influence, much less a father.



Hannah Pittard's "engaging and vigorous" prose masterfully illuminates the problems that can divide modern families--and the ties that prove impossible to break. (Chicago Tribune)

Publication year:
2014
Publisher:
Hachette
Praise:
Quote:
"An indelible portrait of a family, messy and raw. Prickly Kate isn't a particularly sympathetic character-but she feels like a real one."
Credit:
Entertainment Weekly
Quote:
"Fast-paced . . . [Pittard] makes writing short, lively scenes look easy."
Credit:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Quote:
"Richly rewarding . . . A family drama you won't want to put down."
Credit:
People
Quote:
"Hannah Pittard is the writer you won't be able to stop talking about...Her writing will make you laugh and cry in public...Her books are the sort that leave you reading the blurbs, scanning the small print, and prolonging the reading experience. . . She's the kind of writer who gets in your head and makes you evangelize to all of your friends-wide eyes, quick gasp: 'Do you know about Hannah Pittard?' If she's not on your radar yet, she should be. . . . The sibling bond-that complicated and often inexplicable love [is] expertly encapsulated in Reunion."
Credit:
Buzzfeed
Quote:
"Pittard is working with a fertile premise here--a family's discovery of one another's secrets following the death of its patriarch--that bears some unexpected and affecting fruit. The framework feels reminiscent of Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, but the messy blending of Pittard's Pulaski clan gives a familiar construction some very particular complications."
Credit:
Shelf Awareness (starred review)
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels, including Listen to Me (a New York Times Editors' Choice) and Visible Empire (a New York Times "New & Noteworthy" selection). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine.
A&S department affiliation:

“Feminist Pedagogy, Media Literacy & the Politics of Black Women’s Contemporary Art”

This talk will use a hybrid, multi-disciplinary lens to explore how Black women’s art intersects with and influences popular media through mainstream visual representation, as well as its relationship to political discourses on race, gender and embodied experience. Drawing on Black feminism, Literacy Studies and Critical Theory, I focus on the work of Kara Walker and Julie Dash as situated within the contested and politically charged narratives that animate the ways in which we understand current trends and cultural productions ranging from Beyonce’s Lemonade to #BlackGirlMagic to post-Katrina New Orleans. By theorizing these artifacts and relationships, the talk also grapples with contextualizing these works as part of a continuum wherein Black women’s experiences (through artistic production) reflect and constitute a complex network of literacies engaging with race, class, gender, sexuality and revolution. Lastly, the talk aims to mobilize these subjects for classroom practice that responds to the growing need for instructional and curricular innovations that not only include but center Black women's art and feminist theory as potential catalysts for social change.

Sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies and the College of Arts & Sciences

Co-sponsored by Sociology, English, Social Theory, African American & Africana Studies

Date:
Location:
Alumni Gallery (Young Library)

Consumable Sexual Excess: Trafficking, Justice and“Un-Settling” the Meaning of “Free”

Often discussed as individual vulnerabilities exploited by a nefarious “other,” the blueprint for US trafficking began before the establishment of the nation-state—specifically, with the forced movement of indigenous peoples purportedly for the protection of a burgeoning citizenry.  Imagining an indigenous legal futurity, Dr. April Petillo envisions how justice more dependent on radical freedom from targeting than on capture and removal might improve anti-trafficking interventions. Blending legal ethnography, critical trafficking studies and sociolegal analysis reliant on indigenous critique/perspective, Dr. Petillo interrogates the ways that existing anti-trafficking efforts as constitutive tools of a punitive criminal system.  Using her work gathering indian country policy influencer perspectives on claims of targeted recruitment of indigenous peoples for sex trafficking, Dr. Petillo examines how trafficking discourse informed by “law-and-order” feminist rhetoric derails decolonial efforts and reifies jurisdictional coloniality. from this perspective, existing interventions are narrowly defined distractions which simultaneously divert attention from the structural violences that they represent as they increase harm and decrease justice for racialized peoples.  Dr. Petillo also addresses where this perspective shines a different light on approaches grounded in community-defined justice and decolonization than on incarceration.



Sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies and the College of Arts & Sciences

Co-sponsored by African American & Africana studies

Date:
Location:
330E Student Center

Listen to Me

Author(s):
Hannah Pittard
Book summary:

Mark and Maggie’s annual drive east to visit family has gotten off to a rocky start. By the time they’re on the road, it’s late, a storm is brewing, and they are no longer speaking to each other. Adding to the stress, Maggie – recently mugged at gunpoint – is lately not herself, and Mark is at a loss about what to make of the stranger he calls his wife. When the couple is forced to stop for the night at a remote inn completely without power, Maggie’s paranoia reaches an all-time and terrifying high. But as Mark finds himself threatened in a dark parking lot, it’s Maggie who takes control.

Publication year:
2016
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin
Praise:
Quote:
“Pittard proves herself a master of ordinary suspense.”
Credit:
New York Times
Quote:
“Listen to Me elides so many genres that it’s Houdini-like, bursting through constraints. It moves between its two characters’ inner lives as effortlessly as an Olympic swimmer strokes through water.”
Credit:
Ann Beattie, Paris Review blog
Quote:
“A psychologically complex, addictive, and quick-moving read. I didn’t want it to end!”
Credit:
M.O. Walsh, author of New York Times best-selling novel My Sunshine Away
Quote:
“Pittard deserves the attention of anyone in search of today’s best fiction.”
Credit:
Washington Post
Quote:
“Revelatory.”
Credit:
The New Yorker
Quote:
“[Listen to Me] gripped me completely and even gave me nightmares, which is high praise in my book.”
Credit:
Chicago Tribune
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels, including Listen to Me (a New York Times Editors' Choice) and Visible Empire (a New York Times "New & Noteworthy" selection). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, recipient of a 2018 Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine. Her work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, the New York Times, and other publications. She is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing.
A&S department affiliation:

VISIBLE EMPIRE

Author(s):
Hannah Pittard
Book summary:

On a humid summer day, the phones begin to ring: disaster has struck. Chateau de Sully, a Boeing 707 chartered to ferry home more than one hundred of Atlanta’s most prominent citizens from a European jaunt, crashed in Paris shortly after takeoff. It is the second-deadliest disaster in the history of aviation. Overnight, the city of Atlanta changes.

 

Left behind are children, spouses, lovers, and friends faced with renegotiating their lives. Robert, a newspaper editor, must decide if he can reconnect with his beloved but estranged wife, whose swindler parents have left her penniless. Nineteen-year-old Piedmont Dobbs, recently denied admission to an integrated school, senses a moment of uncertain opportunity. And Mayor Ivan Allen is tasked with the job of moving Atlanta forward – the hedonism of the 60s and the urgency of the Civil Rights movement at his city’s doorstep.

 

Visible Empire is the story of a husband and wife who can’t begin to understand each other until chaos drives them to clarity. It’s a story of the promise and hope that remain in the wake of crisis.

Publication year:
2018
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin
Praise:
Quote:
"Captivating...[Pittard] brings her kaleidoscopic perspective to a catastrophe on an epic scale...With her keen eye for social markers and a deft weave of intersecting storylines, Pittard exposes social fissures and tensions over race and class, and how power and privilege play out in the shadows of grief."
Credit:
Los Angeles Times
Quote:
“Pittard’s novel combines a sense of personal loss and turmoil with greater societal change as the civil rights movement arrives at its peak.”
Credit:
New York Times Book Review, A New & Noteworthy selection
Quote:
"Pittard’s earlier novels [...] established her as a formidable writer. The prose in Visible Empire [...] remains assured, polished, readable, and she renders a 1962 Atlanta that is vivid and just-enough interconnected. Ultimately, Pittard shoulders the burden of history with responsibility and resolve, and a brave imagination."
Credit:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Quote:
"On June 3, 1962, a flight carrying more than 100 of Atlanta's wealthiest residents crashed on takeoff from Paris. Pittard's kaleidoscopic novel, a fictionalized account of that disaster and its aftermath, illuminates the personal and communal grief (and, in some cases, wicked delight) of those left behind."
Credit:
the Oprah Magazine, "Top Books of Summer"
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels, including Listen to Me (a New York Times Editors' Choice) and Visible Empire (a New York Times "New & Noteworthy" selection). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, recipient of a 2018 Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine. Her work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, the New York Times, and other publications. She is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing.
A&S department affiliation:

Modernism in a Global Context

Author(s):
Peter J Kalliney
Book summary:

This book provides a critical introduction to the global dimensions of modernist literature.

Publication year:
2015
Publisher:
Bloomsbury
Praise:
Quote:
Engagingly written and keenly aware of the enormity of its topic, Kalliney's book maintains an enviable blend of scholarly rigor and accessible introduction, making it one of the most ideal teaching tools in a series devoted to that audience -- *Modernism/modernity*
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Peter Kalliney holds the William J and Nina B Tuggle Chair in English. He is author of three books on international modernism, of which *Modernism in a Global Context* is the most recent. His current research project examines the literature of decolonization in the context of the Cold War.
A&S department affiliation:
Book URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/modernism-in-a-global-context-9781472569639/

A&S Professor Leads Effort to Develop World’s Largest, Most Inclusive 'Stellar Library'

By Jenny Wells and Jordan Raddick

A Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of all stars currently in the MaNGA Stellar Library, showing temperature and brightness (luminosity) of stars, along with information on their chemical makeup. Photo courtesy of SDSS collaboration.

Want to learn everything there is to know about a subject? Go to the library. Want to learn everything there is to know about stars? Go to the stellar library.

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