Loose of Earth covers 13 months of author Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn’s childhood, when her former Air Force pilot father was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and her devout mother insisted faith (and an extreme diet) would heal him. The likely and unsolvable cause: repeated exposure to PFAs that contaminated the drinking water of every military site where he lived and worked in Texas. Denise Tolan’s Italian Blood follows the emotional minefields of life with her father, whose erratic anger ruled their home. She lays out how the origins of violence can infect a family tree, and what grows from those roots. These memoirists will discuss everything from environmental justice to writing about complicated families and how the body keeps the score.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn
Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn is a lecturer at the University of Chicago Creative Writing program. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, and River Teeth, and was listed as notable in Best American Essays. Her debut book is Loose of Earth: A Memoir.
Photo Credit: Alexander Devora Photography
Denise Tolan’s work has appeared in The Penn Review, Atlas and Alice, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, and The Best Small Fictions, among others. Denise was a finalist for Best of the Net 2022 and the 2019 and 2018 International Literary Awards’ Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award. Her memoir is Italian Blood.
Georgia Erck is a writer, former mentee of the Gemini Ink Mentorship Program and winner of Pitchapalooza. She has performed personal stories for live audiences including Listen to Your Mother, Worth Repeating and Stories Run Amok. The essay “I Smell Gas” from her recently completed memoir Shocking Happy was published in the book Worth Repeating, from Trinity University Press and Texas Public Radio in August 2023.
