John Freeman is a legendary American writer and a literary critic. Freeman grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and California, eventually graduating from Swarthmore College. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world. Freeman is the author of The Tyranny of Email, How to Read a Novelist, and the editor of Tales of Two Cities. His first book of poetry is Maps.
Festivals
Off the Map: Traveling, Self, and Other
Magnes Museum | 2121 Allston Way | Berkeley, CA
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Travel writing is about aspiration as much as place, about a state of being—a hoped-for transformation of identity—as much as a physical landscape. The best travel writing is about exploration of “the other” and an embrace of this new terrain into self and one’s understanding of the greater world. Four writers explore the concept of “place” from very different perspectives. Sylvia Brownrigg’s Invisible Countries, a gorgeous, artist-illustrated Sylph Edition collection of witty, lyrical short pieces, is inspired by Calvino’s guide to imaginary cities. Kerry Campbell’s Dreaming of France is about the imagining of place, about self as defined by a place. Geoff Dyer’s White Sands defies categorization as his travels, compelling and often humorous, become profound metaphors. Literary critic John Freeman’s first book of poetry, Maps, charts the past and present by way of places from New York City to Beirut to American suburbia.
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Author
Sylvia Brownrigg
Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of seven works of fiction. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her novel for children, Kepler’s Dream (published under the name Juliet Bell), was made into an independent feature film. Brownrigg’s most recent novel, Pages for Her, is a sequel to her Lambda Award-winning novel Pages for You. She lives in Berkeley with her family.
Author
Kerry Campbell
Kerry Tepperman Campbell is an award-winning author and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the recipient of the 2017 Blue Light Book Award, and the 2016 New Millennium Poetry Prize. Her debut collection of vignettes and prose poems is Dreaming of France. Campbell’s work has appeared in New Millennium Writings, Bitter Oleander, Paterson Literary Review, Laurel Review, Cloudbank, The Round, and American Mustard. She’s at work on a collection of prose poems and vignettes based on the life of Fletcher Christian, the famous 18th century British mutineer.
Author
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer’s expansive body of work has garnered significant praise, including the Infinity Award for Writing/Criticism, the Somerset Maugham Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. His new book, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, hit bookshelves this year. A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the E. M. Forster Prize and, most recently, the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Dyer is an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dyer is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California.
Board
Olivia E. Sears
Olivia E. Sears is a translator of Italian poetry and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, where she edited the journal Two Lines for over a decade. Her translations of contemporary poet Mariangela Gualtieri have recently appeared in Arkansas International, Circumference, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently completing a manuscript of Gualtieri’s poetry in English, When I Wasn’t Dying.