Galerie de Difformité: The Book as Body, The Body as Book

Followed by an open mic.

Gretchen E. Henderson is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT who writes across genres and the arts to invigorate her critical and creative practices. Working at the intersection of literature, art history, museum studies, disability studies, and music, her research explores museology as a narrative strategy, aesthetics of deformity, poetics of (dis)embodiment / (in)accessibility / author(ity), and the body of the book. Her books include two novels, Galerie de Difformité (&NOW Books, 2011, winner of the Madeleine Plonsker Prize) and The House Enters the Street (Starcherone Books, 2012, shortlisted for the AWP Award Series in the Novel); a critical volume exploring literary appropriations of music, On Marvellous Things Heard (Green Lantern Press, 2011); and a cartographic poetry chapbook, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea (Dancing Girl Press, 2011). Her creative and critical writings have been published in a range of journals and anthologies, including The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, also forthcoming in Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (Tauris). Among other projects while at MIT, Gretchen is working on Ugliness: A Cultural History (for Reaktion Books), while engaging with the Digital Humanities and continuing the collaborative and cross-media deformation of Galerie de Difformité. Gretchen holds degrees from Princeton University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.F.A.), and the University of Missouri (Ph.D.), as well as a Preparatory Certificate in Voice from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Beyond MIT, she is a metaLAB Fellow at Harvard University and an Affiliated Scholar at Kenyon College, where she teaches in the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop.