Cleveland-based writer Hilary Plum will read from her newest novel, State Champ, and will be joined in conversation with author and Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program Assistant Professor Sarah Minor. Described by Bloomsbury, State Champ's publisher, as "Lucid, strange, and deeply metal," the novel follows protagonist Angela, a high-school state champion runner and college dropout, as she has a hunger strike inside the abortion clinic she worked for as a receptionist that was forced to close due to a "heartbeat law" that criminalized most abortions across her state. Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat, praises State Champ as "an acrobatic, harrowing marathon of cut-to-the-quick prose," while Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks, says, "Hilary Plum is one of my favorite writers working today because her curiosity about injustice and liberation is so relentless, so tender, and so alert to the fact that every single one of us is implicated in the struggle."
Hilary Plum is the author of five books, including the poetry collection Excisions, the essay collection Hole Studies, and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose-winning novel Strawberry Fields. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, and she serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. Her work has appeared in Granta, Astra, The Rupture, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Dr. Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of books Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the Noemi Press Book Award for Prose (2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction, and winner of the Big Other Award in Nonfiction and the hybrid chapbook, The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press 2016), winner of the Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest. Her newest book, Carousel, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2027.
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