Narrative Nonfiction

Organizers:
Michelle Boyd, Department of African American Studies
Anna Guevarra, Asian American Studies
Brenda Parker, Urban Planning & Policy
Karen Su, Asian American Resource & Cultural Center
Rachel Weber, Urban Planning & Policy

Narrative Nonfiction Heading link

 

Monday, February 4, 2013, 10:00 AM
 Beryl Satter, Professor of History, Rutgers University
Writing Workshop with Beryl Satter
Satter is a Professor of History at Rutgers University and most recently the author of the award-winning book Family Properties (Metropolitan Books, 2009). This book combines urban history and memoir to tell the story of Satter’s father and his fight against exploitative, racially based real estate speculation in Chicago.

Co-sponsors: Department of History, Department of African American Studies

Monday, November 5, 2012, 10:00 AM
 Kirin Narayan, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Tools to Shape Texts: A Writing Workshop with Kirin Narayan”
BOUT THE SPEAKER
Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of *Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching* (Pennsylvania,1989) awarded the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association and co-winner of the 1990 Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society; *Love, Stars and All That* (Pocket Books, 1994), a novel; *Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales* (Oxford, 1997) an ethnography composed around folktales retold by Urmila Devi Sood; *My Family and Other Saints* (Chicago, 2007), a family memoir; and *Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov* (Chicago, 2012), a manual that offers ways to generate writing through examples and exercises.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Narayan will lead a writing workshop that examines how scholars can incorporate narrative nonfiction techniques in ther writing. Workshop participants will read and discuss a pre-circulated article by Narayan that both illustrates and discusses the use of creative nonfiction in ethnographic writing. Narayan will also lead the group through a writing exercise in which they’ll practice the techniques discussed.

Co-sponsors: Department of Sociology, Department of Anthropology