On your mark, get set, MEMOIR!
Brooklyn Reading Works presents the annual Memoir-A-Thon, which is curated this year by Branka Ruzak. For this special event, she has gathered together a stellar group of memoirists, whose work collectively touches on: incest, teenage psychiatric incarceration, life in a Cuban AIDS sanitorium, a mother's Alzheimer's, and the family legacy of obsessive compulsive disorder.
This iteration of the Memoir-a-thon is not for the faint hearted. That's for sure.
Robert Goolrick reads from "a blistering family memoir of a life deformed."
Mindy Lewis writes in honest, unflinching prose of a teenage stay on a psychiatric ward.
Elena Schwolsky shares her experience working in an AIDS Sanitorium in Cuba.
Erica Silberman writes about her mother's experience with Alzheimer's.
Branka Ruzak writes about a family legacy of obsessive compulsive disorder.
Bios:
Robert Goolrick is the author of The End of the World As We Know It, described by the New York Times, as "a blistering family memoir." His novel A Reliable Wife, will published by Algonquin Book on April 7th. He worked for many years in advertising and lives in NYC.
Mindy Lewis is the author of Life Inside: A Memoir (Washington Square
Press), named a 2003 Book of the Year by the American Journal of Nursing and
an ELLE "Must Read". She is also the editor of Dirt The Quirks, Habits and
Passions of Keeping House, forthcoming from Seal Press this spring. Her
essays have been published in Newsweek, Lilith, Poets & Writers, and Body &
Soul magazines. She teaches at The Writer¹s Voice of the Westside YMCA, and
has also taught at Brooklyn College and the Metropolitan Center of Empire
State College/SUNY.
Elena Schwolsky public health educator in NYC who is writing a memoir
about her experience working in an AIDS Sanatorium in Havana, Cuba in the
mid 90's. Elena spent ten years on the frontlines of the AIDS epidemic as a
pediatric nurse in Newark, NJ. When her husband died of AIDS in 1990, she
found her voice in writing and began to explore the intersection of her
personal and professional experience. In 2001, Elena was honored with an
award for her writing from the Barbara Dane/Money for Women Fund.
Erica Silberman reads from her collection of essays, Nuts in My Pockets,
Tissues Up My Sleeve. She is a playwright, essayist, and screenwriter. She has written
sixteen times for theAtrainplays, a twenty-four hour theatre project. Her
plays have been produced or developed at The Ensemble Studio Theatre, New
World Stages, Playwrights Horizon, the Stonington Opera House, and the
Metropolitan Playhouse. She is published in Teachers and Writers, and will
be published in Playscripts, and Sunday Salon 'zine. Erica has been featured
on NPR's PRI. She is a mentor at Girls Write Now and the co-president of The
New York Coalition of Professional Women in the Arts & Media.
The Where and When
Thursday March 12th at 8 p.m.
Fifth Avenue and Third Street