This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “On Writing” series, conversations aiming to answer questions about how writing matters, now. This conversation will feature V.V. Ganeshananthan (University of Minnesota) and Kate Levin (USC), hosted by Sarah Mesle (USC). Organized in partnership with the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture. Registration is required. REGISTER

Description: What knowledge, what artistry, can a sentence hold? Whose rules must it follow? What kinds of personhood can it express, and how? How does genre shape what a sentence can be? This event brings together two professors and activists who have considered how to craft sentences that bridge the gap between creative and researched writing. We’ll talk about sentences we love, sentences we’re proud of, and sentences that changed what we think a sentence can do. But we’ll also consider “sentence” in a different, juridical, sense — as a judgement, a punishment. We’ll ask: how does remembering the double meaning of “sentence” help us see the overlap between our writing lives and our obligations to justice in the world? 

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, the 2023 Asian Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post). Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and professor of English. Since 2017, she has co-hosted Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Kate Levin is Associate Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California, where she is co-founder and co-director of the Dornsife Prison Education Project. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Nation, and a variety of literary journals.

Open to attendants outside of USC. Registration before the event is required. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-institute/programs/on-writing/.