Mar 4 2010 - Author Jody Lisberger Will Share Feminist Theory on Craft of Writing

Fiction writer and feminist scholar Jody Lisberger will discuss how feminism plays a role in her writing when she speaks on Thursday, March 4, at SUNY Cortland.

Lisberger, the director of Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island (URI), will present "Writing Down the Body: Making the Invisible Visible, the Silent Spoken" from noon to 1 p.m. in Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge. The talk is free and open to the public and one of several Women's History Month events planned on campus during March. This presentation is sponsored by the Women's Studies Program and the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies.

Lisberger will discuss the ways that feminist theory - in ways most writers and scholars would never guess - articulates crucial and concrete ideas for helping fiction and nonfiction writers improve their craft.

Lisberger's presentation will explore five particular lessons relevant to writing craft and life: refusing to be silenced; the power of the margins and the unseen; rethinking the dynamics of desire; defying linearity and narrative order; and inhabiting the space between the literal and the metaphoric.

In speaking about Lisberger's fiction, critics and book reviewers have called her stories an "artful, compromising, and moving exploration of human desire," "graceful and seductive, spare in their telling yet unstintingly powerful in their impact," a "first-rate collection… that starts out strong and keeps on accelerating" (The Boston Globe), "ten perfect tales" (The Louisville Courier), and "build[ing] with ratcheting tension, carefully nurtured thought the accretion of small details (Women's Review of Books)."

Lisberger is the author of a prize-winning collection of stories, Remember Love, published by Fleur de Lis Press in 2008, and the writer of several articles. She serves on the fiction faculty of the Brief Residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University in Louisville, Ky. Lisberger has a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. and has worked as a journalist, editor and grant writer. She has taught fiction, creative nonfiction, literature and feminist theory for more than 25 years at the University of Rhode Island, Brown, Harvard, Tufts, Holy Cross and Boston University.

At URI, she teaches courses that include Postcolonial Literature, Women Writers, and Narrative Theory. Lisberger participates in the summer Ocean State Writer's Conference.

For more information, contact Women's Studies Coordinator Caroline Kaltefleiter at (607) 753-4203 or caroline.kaltefleiter@cortland.edu.