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Please join Arts Writing for a reading and conversation on arts, biography, memoir, cinema, poetry, and the future of arts publishing.
Featuring Robert Polito, author of After the Flood and Mark Alice Durant, author of Confessions of a Working Class Artist.
Moderated by Margaret Rhee, co-sponsored with The New School MFA Photography.
About After the Flood:
A familiar narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career in the 1980s—only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was controversially awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative.
That is not this story.
Here, instead, is Dylan’s second thirty years. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since 1991—since that rainy February night in New York City when Dylan, then forty-nine, accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, signaling in effect that his extraordinary vocation as a vital and indispensable creative force had ended, was over—After the Flood reveals Dylan’s creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.
About Confessions of a Working Class Artist:
Written in an episodic style, mixing personal anecdotes of shame and revelation, sociopolitical observations, and stories from fellow working-class artists, Confessions is not a sociological study nor manifesto; It is an attempt to confront how class forms us and continues to inform the career choices (or lack) and the art we make (or don’t make).
The book acknowledges the burdens and challenges facing poor and working-class creatives, who although lacking privilege and resources, have found the fortitude to create a way forward.
Illustrated with over 30 images from Frédéric Bazille, Jules Breton, Gustav Caillebotte, Maya Deren, Duccio, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Alexander Rodchenko, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the author.
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research and the MFA in Photograpy at Parsons.
Robert Polito will publish three books in 2026: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (Liveright); Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 1960s (Library of America); and, in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, Barbara Loden’s WANDA (Film Desk Books).
Previous books include Savage Art, a biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the poetry collections Hollywood & God and Doubles. He edited Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, for the Library of America, and in collaboration with filmmaker Michael Almereyda and novelist Jonathan Lethem edited Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings. He is also the author of A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and a study of Byron's poetry.
His poems and reviews, criticism, and essays on literature, film, and popular music have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Harpers, The Believer, Bookforum, The Poetry Foundation website, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, and Best American Film Writing.
For nearly a decade, he judged the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, choosing some celebrated and now-canonical books by Leslie Jamison, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, Kevin Young, Terese Svoboda, Margaret Lazarus Dean, and Kate Braverman.
The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program and of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, he served as President of the Poetry Foundation (2013-2015). He recently co-curated with Michael Chaiken essays for Mixing Up the Medicine (Callaway), the catalog of the Bob Dylan Center, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Current projects include Detours, a book on noir in film and literature, and a new collection of poems.
Mark Alice Durant is an artist, writer, and publisher living in Baltimore.
He is author of Confessions of a Working Class Artist, Summer of the White Fox, and After, Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera, 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography, Robert Heinecken: A Material History, and co-author of Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal.
His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Aperture, Art in America, Photograph Magazine, Dear Dave, and many catalogs, monographs, and anthologies including Rania Matar: She, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, and Vik Muniz Seeing is Believing.
He has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of New Mexico, Syracuse University, and the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Center for Creative Photography, the Illinois Arts Council, and the MacDowell Colony.
Durant received his B.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Durant is publisher / editor of Saint Lucy Books.
Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar and new media artist with wide-ranging interests in the areas of ethnic, cultural, queer and feminist media studies, poetics, and creative practice.
She is the author of Machine Dreams: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body (Duke University Press, 2027) and Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017), which won the 2019 Outstanding Achievement in Creative Writing: Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.
Rhee earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in ethnic studies with a Designated Emphasis in new media studies, and her B.A. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Southern California.
Rhee is an assistant professor and the chair of the Arts Writing concentration in the Creative Writing MFA program at The New School.
She lives in New York City.
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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