Sarah Minor in conv with Melissa Febos - Carousel: An Essay on Seeing
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Sarah Minor will read from her new book Carousel: An Essay on Seeing, and will be joined in conversation with fellow Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program professor and award-winning author Melissa Febos. Yale University Press gives this description of Carousel :
"Across short, immersive sections masterfully fusing the slide lecture and the lyric essay, Minor invites us to see across time as a professor-narrator tying the Bayeux Tapestry to surrealist paintings, Instagram reels, and drone warfare. Blending art history with memoir, close looking with confession, Carousel considers how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates contemporary viewers and subjects. In language that captures the disorientation of the whirling ride, Minor shows us how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves" (sarahceniaminor.com/carousel).
Barbara Browning, author of The Miniaturists, praises Carousel as "A dizzying ride past images stabbed into time," while fellow Iowa NWP professor Tisa Bryant, author of recently published Residual, says: "Carousel invites us into the interior horizons of war, media, confinement, and creative impulse, (un)framed, artfully rendered in taut, resonant prose. A gaze-changer."
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She's the author of Carousel: An Essay on Seeing from Yale University Press (2026), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). Minor's prose and visual poems have been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, A Harp in the Stars, and Welcome to the Neighborhood. She is the recipient of a Research Fellowship to Iceland from the American Scandinavian Foundation, a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her essay "Something Clear" was awarded the 2018 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose. Minor serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Editor at Brink Magazine and on the Nonfiction editorial team at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction MFA Program. In addition to her writing practice, Sarah is one half of the collaborative duo Haag Cykell—an ongoing performance series with the artist Johanna Winters that explores modes of storytelling through shadow theater and language (sarahceniaminor.com/about).
Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and a new memoir, The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in The Nonfiction Writing Program (melissafebos.com).
"Across short, immersive sections masterfully fusing the slide lecture and the lyric essay, Minor invites us to see across time as a professor-narrator tying the Bayeux Tapestry to surrealist paintings, Instagram reels, and drone warfare. Blending art history with memoir, close looking with confession, Carousel considers how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates contemporary viewers and subjects. In language that captures the disorientation of the whirling ride, Minor shows us how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves" (sarahceniaminor.com/carousel).
Barbara Browning, author of The Miniaturists, praises Carousel as "A dizzying ride past images stabbed into time," while fellow Iowa NWP professor Tisa Bryant, author of recently published Residual, says: "Carousel invites us into the interior horizons of war, media, confinement, and creative impulse, (un)framed, artfully rendered in taut, resonant prose. A gaze-changer."
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She's the author of Carousel: An Essay on Seeing from Yale University Press (2026), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). Minor's prose and visual poems have been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, A Harp in the Stars, and Welcome to the Neighborhood. She is the recipient of a Research Fellowship to Iceland from the American Scandinavian Foundation, a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her essay "Something Clear" was awarded the 2018 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose. Minor serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Editor at Brink Magazine and on the Nonfiction editorial team at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction MFA Program. In addition to her writing practice, Sarah is one half of the collaborative duo Haag Cykell—an ongoing performance series with the artist Johanna Winters that explores modes of storytelling through shadow theater and language (sarahceniaminor.com/about).
Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and a new memoir, The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in The Nonfiction Writing Program (melissafebos.com).
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Where is it happening?
15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherPrairie Lights Bookstore
