This event is now cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak. Be safe, y’all, and see you in Kansas City in 2021.

"If you can't talk about something, you can't think about something," writer Eula Biss told Krista Tippett in a recent interview. 

Join me as alumni of my classes from across the country and the authors they’ve loved-- writers of sex, illness, and trauma-- read together at our first national Literary Bacchanal!

In the classes I teach, we write the body to call it into being: to celebrate the brightness of sex or to untangle its complication; to find the wisdom at the heart of our illness journeys or to scrutinize the way callous medical care distances us from our own bodies; to write violence against the body with beauty, to write the perpetrator into humanity, to come into new relation with the things that have broken and remade us. We speak what is unspeakable, and afterward more is possible.

Come hear these brave, funny, and insightful stories of the body, at the precise time we most need them. This year’s readers include: Silas Hansen, Kelly Sundberg, Natalie Lima, Suzanne Roberts, Julian Zimlich, Jessica Wright, Anna Stokes, Red Samaniego, Erin Zwiener, Maddie Norris, Hannah Hindley, and Katie Howard, and of course me— Katherine E. Standefer. We’ll also have with us SPECIAL GUEST Marcelo Hernandez Castillo!

The reading will be hosted by La Botanica in San Antonio, not far from the annual AWP conference. La Botanica offers delicious seasonal ingredients and vegan options. Food will be available until 10, with drink service until midnight.

What is a bacchanal?  In Ancient Rome, Bacchanalia were festivals to the god of wine, Bacchus, marked by intoxication and sexual rituals (some of which may have involved violence). But today we know the term bacchanal as referring to any wild revelry, and in this instance we use it to honor a celebration of the body in its full experience, gorgeous and dark, beautiful and painful.