Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A conversation with Selby Wynn Schwartz at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 19/03/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
What if women’s lives and relationships were at the center of history? What kinds of stories would we have access to – stories of love between women and of female subjectivity – if our historical record were not dominated by male voices?
In her debut novel, After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz recovers biographical fragments about queer feminist women from history and weaves them together with imagined details. Schwartz breathes life into the stories of these writers, philosophers, and artists, melding their voices together to create a kaleidoscope of women’s experience. Much of the book is written in the voice of a collective, female “we” – what one NPR reviewer calls “the first person choral.” Join us for a conversation with Schwartz about women’s history, Sapphic lineage, and After Sappho’s genre-bending fusion of fiction and biography.
About the speaker:
Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press), which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and shortlisted for both the 2023 Orwell Prize in Political Fiction and the 2023 James Tait Black Prize in Fiction. Her novella A Life in Chameleons received the 2021 Reflex Press Novella Award; in summer 2024, she will be a Fellow at the Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation with Selby Wynn Schwartz at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 19/03/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
What if women’s lives and relationships were at the center of history? What kinds of stories would we have access to – stories of love between women and of female subjectivity – if our historical record were not dominated by male voices?
In her debut novel, After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz recovers biographical fragments about queer feminist women from history and weaves them together with imagined details. Schwartz breathes life into the stories of these writers, philosophers, and artists, melding their voices together to create a kaleidoscope of women’s experience. Much of the book is written in the voice of a collective, female “we” – what one NPR reviewer calls “the first person choral.” Join us for a conversation with Schwartz about women’s history, Sapphic lineage, and After Sappho’s genre-bending fusion of fiction and biography.
About the speaker:
Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press), which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and shortlisted for both the 2023 Orwell Prize in Political Fiction and the 2023 James Tait Black Prize in Fiction. Her novella A Life in Chameleons received the 2021 Reflex Press Novella Award; in summer 2024, she will be a Fellow at the Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
