Just Bring Yourself: A Conversation with Ann Hood and Julia Ridley Smith

*All events are FREE, but we do ask that you please register so that we can monitor attendance and venue capacity.*

Join us for a conversation about the pleasures and challenges of writing memoir. When mining material from their own lives, how do writers decide what to include and what to let go? How much (or little) are family members and friends included in the research and writing? We’ll also talk about the role of humor in memoir and how these writers approach memoir differently from (or similarly to) the fiction they write. With ANN HOOD and JULIA RIDLEY SMITH. Hosted by MOLLY SENTELL HAILE.

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• Memoir Plus: A Conversation on Hybrid Memoir
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• Lost Mothers: Memoirs of Longing
• $ WORKSHOP Writing from the Body with Nicole Lungerhausen

ANN HOOD is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer and The Book That Matters Most. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was a NYT Editors Choice and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. She lives in Rhode Island and NYC.

JULIA RIDLEY SMITH is the author of a memoir, The Sum of Trifles (University of Georgia Press, 2021). She’s published fiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in Ecotone, the New England Review, and Southern Cultures, and was recognized as notable in The Best American Essays. She has taught creative writing and literature at UNC Greensboro and is the 2021–22 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill.

MOLLY SENTELL HAILE is a writer and educator whose short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Oxford American, The North Carolina Literary Review, Epiphany, O. Henry Magazine, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Doris Betts Fiction Prize and is a Pushcart and O. Henry Award nominee. Her work received a Notable designation in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s MFA in Creative Writing, she currently teaches creative writing classes for people with cancer, survivors, and caregivers at Hirsch Wellness Network in Greensboro and is at work on her first novel.