Robert Lunday and Maggie Messitt will talk about the missing persons in their lives – and how, as writers, they’ve explored intersections of self and family with historical, cultural, sociological, and other disciplinary approaches to the broader understanding of disappearance.  

Robert Lunday is the author of Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Award for 2021 and published in 2023 by the University of New Mexico Press. His first book, Mad Flights, was published in 2002 by Ashland Poetry Press, and his second, a prose-poem essay called Gnome, was the first volume published by Black Sun Lit. Lunday has been a Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a two-time fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. After many years in Texas, he has recently moved to Japan.

Maggie Messitt is the author of Newspaper, part of the Object Lessons series, and The Rainy Season, a work of narrative and immersion journalism, long-listed for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in South Africa, where she lived and worked as an independent journalist for 8 years. Messitt is currently the Norman Eberly Professor of Practice in Journalism and Director of the News Lab at Penn State. She has spent the last decade working on a a hybrid of investigation and memoir, a deeply personal missing persons case, which you can learn more about here and here.

This event is free but registration is required. Please register here.