Banned Books Week: Carmen Maria Machado Reading

In celebration of Banned Books Week, Carmen Maria Machado will read from her acclaimed memoir, In the Dream House, at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 25 at Holmes Lounge. Following her reading, she will discuss book bans and the banning of her own books with WashU Professor of English Melanie Micir. Come early for food and drinks—the reception will begin at 5 p.m.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, among others. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere.

Melanie Micir is an associate professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her first book, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives (Princeton University Press, 2019), was short-listed for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Award. She will (as usual!) be teaching some of Carmen Maria Machado’s work in her Spring 2025 course on “Contemporary Women Writers.” 

Co-sponsored by the Washington University Center for the Humanities

RSVP