Free & Open to the Public
When: Tuesday, November 14
The Writer’s Story: 4:00PM, Ness Family Lobby
Reading: 7:00PM, Scandinavian Cultural Center
Jennifer Sinor is the author of three books, most recently Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe (New Mexico 2017) and Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir (Utah 2017). Her essays have appeared in numerous places including The American Scholar, UTNE, Seneca Review, and Gulf Coast. The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism as well as nominations for the National Magazine Award and the Pushcart Prize, Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She lives in Logan with her husband, poet Michael Sowder, and her two sons.
"Georgia O’Keeffe mistrusted words. She claimed color as her language. Nevertheless, in the course of her long life, the great American painter wrote thousands of letters―more than two thousand survive between her and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, alone. Jennifer Sinor’s Letters Like the Day honors O’Keeffe, her modernist landscapes, and, crucially, the value of letter writing. In the painter’s correspondence, we find an intimacy with words that is all her own. Taking her letters as a touchstone, Sinor experiments with the limits of language using the same aesthetic that drove O’Keeffe’s art. Through magnification, cropping, and juxtaposition―hallmarks of modernism―Sinor explores the larger truths at the center of O’Keeffe’s work: how we see, capture, and create. Letters Like the Day pursues the highest function of art―to take one’s medium to the edge and then push beyond."