View streaming video of John Keene, Counternarrative: October 29, 2015
Video highlight clips: Excerpt from "Cold" | Remarks on St. Louis
John Keene reads from his remarkable new collection of stories and novellas, Counternarratives — praised by Sarah Schulman as "a cross-time, cross-space, cross-form-into-forms-you-have-never-seen-before NOVEL (and I claim it is a novel) about slavery."
John Keene
John Keene was born in St. Louis in 1965. He graduated from the St. Louis Priory School, Harvard College and New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective. He is a graduate fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. He teaches at Rutgers University, Newark.
“THIS is one of the best books I have EVER read. It is the only book that I have ever compared to the work of Henry Dumas.” —Tân Khánh Cao, City Lights Books
“Walking around with my friends’ books in my bag gives me power as I enter meetings. Have you gotten your copy of John Keene’s excellent collection, Counternarratives? Don’t sleep, family. He’s come from the future to save us from the brutal imaginations.” —r. erica doyle
Related event
John Keene, Counternarratives: Reading and in Conversation with Tân Khánh Cao, October 30