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Join us for a reading with author, Irvin Weathersby Jr. (Nonfiction '09) as he sits down with Randy Winston (Fiction '16) to discuss his memoir In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space.
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at the Schools of Public Engagement.
Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. His writing has been featured in Esquire, The Atlantic, The Root, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, a BA from Morehouse College and has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. Photo credit: Boris Brenman
Randy Winston, born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, is a 2016 graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The New School. He is the Creative Director of Fiction at The Black List. The Black List is a renowned platform dedicated to nurturing written storytelling and empowering writers to maximize their professional talent.
The New School offered the first academic creative writing workshop in 1931 and pioneered a new philosophy of education. The idea: students would make their own lives and their own stories part of their education. Today, The New School continues to celebrate and cultivate daring and diverse new voices through its Creative Writing program. The value of this approach is reflected in the publications and achievements of our MFA Creative Writing graduates and faculty.
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Irvin Weathersby is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. His writing has been featured in Esquire, The Atlantic, The Root, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, a BA from Morehouse College and has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. Photo credit: Boris Brenman
Moderator: Randy Winston, born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, is a 2016 graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The New School. He is the Creative Director of Fiction at The Black List. The Black List is a renowned platform dedicated to nurturing written storytelling and empowering writers to maximize their professional talent. Winston is the former Director of Writing Programs at The Center for Fiction, where he managed, curated, and directed the production of writing courses, the First Novel Prize, the Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, and the Writers Studio. He served as Fiction Editor at Slice Literary Magazine for 6 years. Randy sits on the board for Orion Magazine and the board for WriteOn NYC. He’s appeared in Variety, The L.A. Times, Deadline, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Brooklyn Magazine among others. His interviews in print, online, and on stage have included Maggie Nelson, Mohsin Hamid, Yiyun Li, Mira Jacob, Aleksandar Hemon, Victor LaValle, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Tomi Adeyemi, A.E. Osworth, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Rumaan Alam, Deesha Philyaw, Megha Majumdar, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Lauren Wilkinson, Morgan Jerkins, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Alcy Leyva, Benjamin Lazar Davis, and Hugo McCloud, among others. Winston is currently at work on his first novel. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photo credit: Zach Gross.
