Great News About Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity!
For more than three years, I have been working on a book of hybrid essays that blend research, literary theory, and personal experience. Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity explores my peripatetic childhood as the daughter of two American Foreign Service Officers. Born in Italy, I grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States, in houses that were filled with art collected during our posts overseas. Generational trauma, the intersection of personal and national histories, the complexities of life in the Foreign Service—these are some of the subjects considered in Exhibitions, a book that shows how the artful objects in our lives can become occasions for self-reflection.
A few weeks ago, I received the exciting news that Exhibitions had been accepted for publication by University of New Mexico Press, which previously published my poetry collection, The Arranged Marriage. I am absolutely thrilled that the book has found a home. Because these essays so often examine the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity—what happens when beauty intersects with horror—I’ve tried to be extremely vigilant about addressing the relationship between form and content in my writing. What kind of vessel does each story demand? How might I engage with genocide and trauma studies in ways that are attentive to the anxieties and literary traditions of these fields?
Essays from Exhibitions have appeared in The New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, among others. You can read “The Dead Class” here at Image, “The Red Picture and the Blue” here at The Common, and “On the Color Matching System; Or, Marriage” here at The Normal School.