The Art of Retelling the Truth with Melissa Febos and Jamie Hood

Melissa Febos and Jamie Hood are two of the most astute essayists working today on the subject of trauma and embodiment. For Febos, this has taken the form of memoirs like Abandon Me and The Dry Season, where she interrogates her life with the rigor and wit of a scholar. For Febos, no statement, no feeling, no memory goes unexamined. Hood engages with a similar practice in her critical essays and books. In How to Be a Good Girl, Hood explored notions of ideal womanhood and its threats through lyric essays and poems; in her latest, Trauma Plot, she charts the intersections between her personal traumas and the social responses to trauma narratives following the advent of MeToo. Both writers are esteemed, relentless surveyors of the self. In this conversation moderated by 2025-26 Shearing Fellow Isle McElroy, Febos and Hood will discuss queerness, embodiment, trauma, and the narratives we create to make sense of ourselves.

Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and a new memoir, The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a professor at the University of Iowa.

Jamie Hood is the author of Trauma Plot: A Life, the hybrid pandemic diary how to be a good girl, the semi-monthly, Proust-infused newsletter regards, marcel, and a book of love poetry, forthcoming in 2026. She lives in Brooklyn.

Isle McElroy is the author of The Atmospherians and People Collide, named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, NPR, Them, and the New York Times Critics. Their essays appear in the New York Times, The Cut, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. In 2021 they founded Debuts & Redos, a socially-distanced, in-person reading series for writers who debuted during lockdown and could not hold in-person readings. They have a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and they currently teach in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Parking/getting there: For all patrons including those in wheelchairs or who have mobility challenges, we recommend parking in the Cottage Grove Parking Garage, Lot A. Parking at UNLV is free after 1pm on Fridays.

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