Thursday, March 3 at 6:00pm PT

In this Sandra and Carl Ellston Ars Poetica Fund virtual reading and conversation, essayists Emily Maloney and Katherine Standefer discuss their experiences in the healthcare system and writing about the body. Our moderator is EOU MFA faculty member Melissa Matthewson, whose debut essay collection Tracing the Desire Line (2019) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Nonfiction.

Emily Maloney is the author of Cost of Living: Essays (2022), which chronicles her experiences as both a patient and an ER technician. Her work has appeared in Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Essays, among others, and she is twice the recipient of MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Illinois.

Katherine E. Standefer’s debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (2020), about her troubled relationship to her own implanted cardiac defibrillator, was a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and for the Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Memoir. It was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick and featured on NPR’s Fresh Air. She lives in New Mexico with her chickens.