As we hit the five-year anniversary of Covid’s onset, please join us for an intimate reading and discussion on empathy and social distance -- the ways we've navigated being vulnerable bodies in shared spaces in the pandemic’s wake. Drawing from his essay, "Lloyd's Mattress," author Scott Korb will reflect on how “social distancing” has amplified our collective shame and disgust, and become a wedge against empathy (towards ourselves and each other). Scott Korb will be joined by Taly Matejka and Rowan Bayne, of USC’s Writing Program, to position writing as a means of grappling with the social and political transformations of the last five years.  

This event is part of Writing Lives, an annual speaker series from The USC Writing Program that convenes public intellectuals working at the intersections of scholarship and the personal essay.

Scott Korb is the director of the MFA in Writing at Pacific University, in Oregon. He’s the author of The Faith Between Us, Life in Year One, and Light without Fire, and is an editor of two academic collections: The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers and Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy.

Taly Matejka and Rowan Bayne, co-founders of Writing Lives, teach in the Writing Program at USC.

With generous support from The USC Writing Program, The Levan Institute for the Humanities, and the ExL Lab of the Dornsife Office of Experiential and Applied Learning.

No registration required.