Day of Reckoning: A Reading with Cris Mazza and Christina Pugh

For those in search of grounding in a turbulent time, award-winning authors Cris Mazza and Christina Pugh present a reading centered around healing and growth. The authors will be in conversation with each other and will read from their latest books. In her new memoir , Mazza searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance amidst loss. Pugh's latest collection of poetry,, explores the physical, emotional, and philosophical experiences of chronic pain and healing.

Mazza’s essays in The Decade of Letting Things Go contain many of life’s expected losses: pets, parents, and old mentors. Yet, some of her late-life experiences aren’t so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get her to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in thirty-year-old #MeToo incidents; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from forty-five years ago might be declining into dementia. Ultimately, Mazza searches for contentment with either the mark one makes in the world or the identity one chooses to embrace. 

Cris Mazza is the author of three previous memoirs, eleven novels and six collections of short fiction. Mazza's first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. She is a native of Southern California and has recently retired from a 31-year tenure as a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

With urgent lyricism and lacunae on the page, The Right Hand radiates with incredible artistic vision and craft. In the second half of the collection, the poet spends extended time with Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy in Rome, finding this famous scene of wounding to be in dialogue with her own experience of pain, as well as her suspension between languages and spiritual isolation. In The Right Hand, the hidden sites of the body speak, and Bernini’s centuries-old arrow pierces us with hurting eloquence.

Christina Pugh is the author of five previous books of poems, as well as a book of essays. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and many other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow in poetry, she has received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. A recent visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, she is professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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