Afternoon Reading with Sam Sax

Part of the Creative Writing Visiting Writers Series

Join SMC's Creative Writing Department in Hagerty Lounge for a Literary Conversation with visiting writer Sam Sax, author of Yr Dead, longlisted for the National Book Award.

Sam Sax’s latest is Yr Dead, a novel longlisted for the National Book Award. Their poetry books have garnered prizes from the National Poetry Series and the Academy of American Poets. Sam Sax is an artist thinking about the figure of the animal, transgression, queerness, faith/Judaism, constructions of gender/masculinity, state violence/surveillance. Their debut novel illuminates the queer and Jewish experiences of a nonbinary person whose life flashes before their eyes as they light themself on fire.

In the summer of 2016, attending protests, Sax felt suicidal. “This book began as a small lyric I started writing to try to save my own life, as an exercise in control,” they said in an interview with MacSweeney’s. “I always have been fascinated with the protest as a space where history and the future collide in the present. As both a liminal space of concrete demands and utopian imagination as well as an appropriated and corruptible space that can reify structural harm. How the protest can model and cry out for possible futures and can also be a kind of theater that enacts Brecht’s critique of catharsis, and I’m interested by how often we move through these spaces dreaming of a better world while reproducing our own.”

Visiting Writer events at Saint Mary's are free, open to the public, and ADA Accessible. Visitor parking is available on campus and light refreshments will be served. All attendees are eligible for a fee waiver for the MFA in Creative Writing application—please reach out to Collin Skeen, Assistant Director of Admissions, at cas38@stmarys-ca.edu for more information.