Rebecca Solnit
BGSU and ICS are pleased to welcome award-winning independent writer, cultural historian, art critic, public intellectual, and political activist Rebecca Solnit to campus on Monday, February 23. On that morning, she will offer a workshop, Art and Activism, from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm in 308 BTSU where she will focus on the pivotal roles stories play in our private and social lives and the ways in which art and the imagination can be mobilized to support hopeful activist agendas. That evening, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm in the Union Theater, Solnit will read from a broad selection of her works in order to convey a sense of the variety and scope of the topics on which she writes. She will focus on what drives her intellectual curiosity as a writer, how she researches the astonishing range of topics on which she writes, and the ways in which her political commitments figure in her writing.
Solnit’s 16 books include the best-selling “Men Explain Things to Me,” “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster,” and “The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.” She has also published cultural atlases of New Orleans and San Francisco. Her many awards include two NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for “River of Shadows: Eadward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.”
For more information and a sampling of Solnit’s work, visit the ICS website at:http://www.bgsu.edu/arts-and-sciences/institute-for-the-study-of-culture-and-society.html.