This event has been postponed. Please check back soon for a rescheduled date.
Join us for a reading with Jordan Kisner, who will be reading from her debut essay collection, Thin Places. This event will be free and open to the public.
About the Book: The essays in Thin Places track Jordan Kisner’s searching, incisive, and often funny quest through the fun house of modern culture. Kisner is captivated by the subtle systems guiding contemporary life. Her celebrated title essay about an experimental neurosurgery developed to treat severe obsessive-compulsive disorder—which blends elements of reportage and memoir, and engages with everything from Celtic lore and the DSM-5 to Susan Sontag and Hitchcock’s Vertigo—typifies her sensibilities.
Other essays are explicitly about the state of one or another American religious tradition: young evangelical Christians proselytizing in nightclubs and on Instagram; Mormon women politely trying to overthrow the government. Still others probe at secular subjects of American worship—the U.S.-Mexico border, debutante balls, fine art, the body. Each identifies a moment of dissolution between the binaries that make up our country. Intellectually curious and emotionally engaging, these essays are both intimate and expansive, illuminating unusual facets of American life.
About the Author: Jordan Kisner is the author of Thin Places, which will be published on March 3 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Her essays have appeared in n+1, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, and others. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and selected for residencies by PioneerWorks, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art OMI. She teaches writing at Columbia University.