Megan Marshall on the Art of Biography, with Martha Hodes

Megan Marshall on the Art of Biography, with Martha Hodes

Event Location: The Skylight Room: 9100

Megan Marshall’s innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured works of American biography. In the richly absorbing essays of After Lives, Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art, life, and the people in it.

In each of six essays, Marshall reinvents the personal essay form, as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s brilliant, assured interplay between memoir and biography places surprising characters on the page, including the twelfth-century Buddhist hermit Kamo no Chomei, a reassuring spiritual presence for Marshall during several otherwise deracinating months in Kyoto. In her stunning coming-of-age tale, “Free for a While,” set in 1970s California, Marshall interweaves the story of her adolescence with that of Black Power martyr Jonathan Jackson, the author’s AP history classmate, gunned down at seventeen in a failed attempt to free his famed older brother George from Pr*son in the case that put Angela Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Megan Marshall is the author of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, a collection of retrospective essays on the biographer’s craft, and three biographies: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Marshall is Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor Emerita at Emerson College, where she taught life writing and archival research in the MFA Creative Writing program.

Martha Hodes, Professor of History at New York University, is most recently the author of My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, which was excerpted in the New Yorker and named an editor’s choice by the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of Mourning Lincoln; The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South.

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