History is full of people who just didn’t*

The Cheapest University invites Anne Boyer to dis­cuss pos­sible forms of col­lec­tive strug­gles and com­mit­ments within writing and art. This con­ver­sa­tion will focus on two books by Anne Boyer: Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and The Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). In these books, the author reflects on post-fem­i­nism, the his­tory of labor through gender and the links between Marxism and fem­i­nism, putting for­ward the hypoth­esis of eman­ci­pa­tion from poetry and through poetry.

For the occa­sion, The Cheapest University con­tinues its work of trans­lating untrans­lated English-speaking authors into French, through a pub­li­ca­tion in col­lab­o­ra­tion with After 8 Books.The con­ver­sa­tion will be fol­lowed by a cross-reading between Anne Boyer and The Cheapest University, based on the trans­lated texts.

* excerpt from No, in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Anne Boyer.

Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist from Kansas City. Her poetry books include The Romance of Happy Workers, My Common Heart, and Garments Against Women. Her newest book is a col­lec­tion of essays, fables, and ephemera called A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. The Undying, a memoir about cancer, care, and having a body inside of his­tory, is forth­coming in 2019 from FSG (US) and Penguin (UK). Her honors include the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2018 Whiting Award in non­fic­tion and poetry, and the 2016 CLMP award for Garments Against Women. She is cur­rently the Judith E. Wilson poetry fellow at Cambridge University, and she is an Associate Professor of the Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute where she teaches lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­ophy, and writing.