Written on the Body: Our Scars and the Stories They Tell

Here we bring together a trio of memoirists exploring the strengths and limitations of the physical body alongside the tenacity and determination of the spirit. GREG MARSHALL'S (Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It) is a hilarious and poignant memoir grappling with family, disability, and coming of age in two closets—as a gay man and as a man living with cerebral palsy. MADDIE NORRIS'S (The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays) is a multilayered examination of grief after the death of her father through a lens that likens mourning to wound care. KELLEY SHINN (The Wounds That Bind), a double amputee at the age of sixteen, becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of landmine survivors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

GREG MARSHALL was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, his work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays and published in Electric Literature, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Leg is his first book. LEARN MORE

MADDIE NORRIS is the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays. Her work appears in Guernica, Fourth Genre, Territory, and Essay Daily, among other publications. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and have been named as notable in Best American Essays. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. LEARN MORE

KELLEY SHINN is the author of the recent debut memoir, The Wounds That Bind Us. Her other nonfiction work has appeared in various places including Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Fourth Genre, and The New York Times. She lives in Ocracoke, North Carolina, a remote island village with a curious number of feral cats and women.

HOST

DR. JEN FEATHER is the Head of the English Department at UNCG and a member of the Humanities at Work internship team. She has written extensively on gender and embodiment. She is currently working on a book about her own family history and the value of the humanities.