Truth & Beauty: Telling Our Stories in Writing that Moves & Matters

In this interactive presentation and workshop, we will talk about reading, writing, traveling, listening, and imagining, all as ways to freshen and widen our perspectives. Connections to one another through stories, poems, and conversation will help us determine what we mean by truth in a moment when the notion and the word are contested. Together, we will explore poetic/philosophical truth along with “objective truth,” and make mini wonder books, lists of questions, and ways to approach those questions through writing. We will examine how art and writing can be fueled not by what we know, but by what we ask. We will keep our world views – and expressions of our experiences – kaleidoscopic.

Participants will write something – anything from a single line or list to a poem or scene – that feels beautiful and therefore true, or true and therefore beautiful.

Presented by Rachel DeWoskin, award winning author of five novels, a memoir, and two poetry collections.

Part of the Road Scholar Program, funded by Illinois Humanities.

For adults and high school students. Registration required.

About Rachel DeWoskin (Chicago, IL):
Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin Random House, 2019); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Blind (Penguin Random House, 2015); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005), and two poetry collections: Two Menus (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Absolute Animal (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Her awards include a National Jewish Book Award, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and the Academy of American Poets Award.

Three of her books, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Someday We Will Fly, and Banshee, are being developed for feature film or television.

DeWoskin’s poems, essays, and articles have appeared in journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Baffler, Ploughshares, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. DeWoskin has been a professor at Boston University, New York University, and the University of Chicago. She is the curator of Theater For One’s Poetry For One project, the founder of the Illinois 900 Million Poem Project, and a member of the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).