Join us for an evening with Sofia Samatar, who will speak about her new nonfiction book, Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. A conversation with Emily Ogden will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces an attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing.
In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.
In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a Black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written?
Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.
About the Author: Sofia Samatar is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the World Fantasy Award–winning novel A Stranger in Olondria to Tone, a study of literary tone with Kate Zambreno. Samatar is the Roop Distinguished Professor of English at James Madison University, where she teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction.
About the Moderator: Emily Ogden is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays (University of Chicago Press). She is working on Frailties, a book about Edgar Allan Poe.
