This year’s Susan D. Gubar Lecture will be given by poet Patricia Lockwood on March 6th at 5pm in the Neal-Marshall Grand Hall. In preparation for her visit, we will be holding a reading group on her acclaimed memoir Priestdaddy on Friday, February 15th from 10am-12pm at CAHI (1211 Atwater Avenue, Bloomington). The discussion will be led by Cathy Bowman and Stephanie Li. We welcome students, faculty, staff and members of the Bloomington community to join the conversation about this moving and often hilarious book. Bagels and coffee will be served.
Named one the Ten Best Books of 2017 by the New York Times, Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy (Riverhead Books) is an unforgettable memoir of growing up in a family with a guitar- shredding priest for a father. Lockwood’s father, a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism after watching The Exorcist in a submarine, what he claims was the “deepest conversion on record.” Having received a dispensation from the authorities, Lockwood’s father became that rare thing—a married Catholic priest—and Lockwood herself “a human loophole.” Both hilarious and deeply moving, Priestdaddy is ultimately an exploration of our divided and contradictory world, in language so exuberant that it seems to bless everything it names.
Patricia Lockwood is also the author of two collections of poetry, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (Penguin, 2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, London Review of Books, Tin House, and Poetry.
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