Join author Claire Dederer and MMA Trustee and fellow author, W. Ralph Eubanks, for an exploration of Dederer’s book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Together they will discuss the audience’s relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work?
Immediately following the program, Claire will hold a book signing outside of The Museum Store. The Store has limited copies of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. If you would like to go ahead and purchase a copy to be put on hold for the signing, please call 601-965-9939.
Schedule of Events:
- 5 PM Doors and cash bar opens
- 5:30 PM Claire Dederer reads excerpts from Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
- 5:45 PM Conversation with W. Ralph Eubanks and Claire Dederer
- 6:45 PM Q+A
- 7 PM Book Signing
About Claire Dederer
Claire Dederer is a memoirist, essayist, and critic. Her books include the national bestseller Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma; the critically acclaimed Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning; and Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses, which was a New York Times bestseller.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, is Dederer’s new nonfiction book investigating good art made by bad people. A hybrid of essay, criticism, and memoir, Monsters is based on her globally viral 2017 essay for the Paris Review, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Monsters is out now in the US, the UK, and the Commonwealth; editions are scheduled for Germany, France, the Netherlands, Korea, Spain, Turkey, and Italy.
Dederer is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Her essays, criticism, and reviews have also appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, Vogue, Marie Claire, Elle, Real Simple, Entertainment Weekly, New York magazine, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Slate, Salon, High Country News, and many other publications. She began her career as the chief film critic for Seattle Weekly.
Dederer currently teaches at the Pacific University low-residency MFA program. She is the recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and a Lannan Foundation residency.
Dederer lives on her late father’s houseboat in Seattle.
About W. Ralph Eubanks
Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi, which was published on March 16, 2021, by Timber Press. A Place Like Mississippi takes readers on a complete tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of authors. This is a book that honors and explores the landscape of Mississippi—and the Magnolia State’s history—and reveals the many ways this landscape has informed the work of some of America’s most treasured authors.
Eubanks is the author of two other books: Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past (Basic Books) and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (HarperCollins). Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named Ever is a Long Time as one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. Richard Ford wrote that The House at the End of the Road “finds its truth in between conventional wisdom and sociological presumption, in between lies and faulty history. It is a story of race, of family, of place itself, and it tells us that compassion and the stirring force of individual human endeavor finally mean more than anything.”
Eubanks has contributed articles to the Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, WIRED, The Hedgehog Review,The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and National Public Radio. A graduate of the University of Mississippi (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (M.A., English Language and Literature), he is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he was a national fellow at the New America Foundation, and was the 2021-2022 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Ralph lives in Washington, DC, with his wife. From 1995 to 2013 he was director of publishing for the Library of Congress and is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia. In February 2023 he was awarded the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature and as a cultural ambassador for Mississippi. Currently he is the faculty fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and is at work on his next book, which focuses on the Mississippi Delta and has the working title When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning.
