Kristen E. Nelson [Host: Teresa Carmody]

On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Teresa Carmody interviews Kristen E. Nelson.

Kristen E. Nelson is a queer writer, performer, and community builder. In addition to In the Away Time (Autofocus Books, 2024), she is the author of the length of this gap (Damaged Goods, August 2018) and two chapbooks: sometimes I gets lost and is grateful for noises in the dark (Dancing Girl, 2017) and Write, Dad (Unthinkable Creatures, 2012). She has published creative and critical writing in Feminist Studies, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, Trickhouse, and Everyday Genius, among others. Kristen is the founder of Casa Libre en la Solana, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona, where she worked as the Executive Director for 14 years and the co-founder of Four Queens with Selah Saterstrom. Kristen is currently a Ph.D. student and graduate student instructor at the University of California – Santa Cruz in the Literature Department’s creative/critical writing concentration.

Teresa Carmody’s writing includes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. She is the author of three books and four chapbooks, including Maison Femme: a fiction (2015) and The Reconception of Marie (2020). Her work has appeared in The Collagist, LitHub, WHR, Two Serious Ladies, Diagram, St. Petersburg Review, Faultline, and was selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing and by Entropy for its Best Online Articles and Essays list of 2019. Carmody is co-founding editor of Les Figues Press, an imprint of LARB Books in Los Angeles, and director of Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Her forthcoming book A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is out early next year with Autofocus Books.

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Full conversation topics include:

--  the first event for In the Away Time

--  imperfect queer and trans narratives 

-- calling in community

-- projects conceived in love

--other voices in In the Away Time

-- getting a PhD later in life

-- hybridity and divinations

-- the limits of the body

-- constraint and the autobiographical

-- the timescape of In the Away Time

-- the roles we play in our own disasters

-- autotheory and autoethnography

-- knowing when the form is the form

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Podcast theme music provided by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac. Here's more of his project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.

The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton, author of Home Movies.