Ames Hawkins and Letter Writing

One of the themes of this year’s festival is how we speak to each other through words - specifically, though the letters we write. And while in this era of emails and texts, some people might consider letter-writing to be quaintly out-of-date, we’d beg to differ. Ames Hawkins is the author of These are Love(d) Letters, a genre-bending visual memoir and work of literary nonfiction that explores the questions: What inspires a person to write a love letter? What inspires a person to save a love letter even when the love has shifted or left? And what does it mean when a person uses someone else’s love letters as a place from which to create their own sense of self?

Recently selected as one of Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex’s 30 Writers to Watch, Ames Hawkins’s work appears in a number of edited volumes, and across a range of academic and literary publications—both print and online—such as Pre/Text, Constellations, Palaver Journal, enculturation, Slag Glass City, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, and Water~Stone Review. A Professor of English and Creative Writing, and the Associate Provost for Faculty Research and Development at Columbia College Chicago, Hawkins also co-hosted and co-produced the scholarly podcast Masters of Text (mastersoftext.com). Find out more at www.ameshawkins.com