Cultural Explorations: Readings from Memoirs

Michael White teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and currently serves as Chair of the Creative Writing Department. White has received many awards for his writing, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry collections are The Island; Palma Cathedral, winner of the Colorado Prize; Re-entry, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize; and Vermeer in Hell, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. Travels in Vermeer (Persea Books), a Longlist selection for the 2015 National Book Award, Nonfiction, is part travelogue, part soul-searching meditation on love, and an intimate discourse on art, which encompasses the author’s past—his difficult youth, alcoholism and recovery, and the early death of his cherished first wife—as well as the present. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Clifford Thompson's essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Commonweal, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, Oxford American, Black Issues Book Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of a novel, Signifying Nothing, and the nonfiction collection Love for Sale and Other Essays, which won a 2013 Whiting Writer’s Award . His most recent book is Twin of Blackness: A Memoir (Autumn House Press). Charles Johnson, National Book Award winner and author of Middle Passage and Being and Race writes, “Twin of Blackness is a culturally important memoir that traces an artist's evolution in the post civil rights era, a literary odyssey that comes triumphantly to rest in a humanity that transcends small-spirited notions about race. Clifford Thompson is simply one of the wisest, warmest, and most trustworthy essayists writing today.”

Julie Marie Wade is the author of four collections of poetry, including When I Was Straight, and four collections of lyric nonfiction, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures.  She has received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir.  She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. Her latest collection of essays is Catechism: A Love Story (SPD Books). Jenny Boully writes, “Catechism: A Love Story is a gorgeous collection of poetic essays on reading, loving, and, most delightfully, reading love between the lines. Julie Marie Wade's prose refuses tradition and convention, the expected beginnings and endings, preferring instead to investigate the gray unknowns of ritual and sacrament in life, reading, and love.