7pm
A kaleidoscopic anthology of essays published by Catapult magazine about the stories our bodies tell, and how we move within—and against—expectations of race, gender, health, and ability.
Bodies are serious, irreverent, sexy, fragile, strong, political, and inseparable from our experiences and identities as human beings. Pushing the dialogue and confronting monolithic myths, this collection of essays tackles topics like weight, disability, desire, fertility, illness, and the embodied experience of race in deep, challenging ways.
Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in Body Language affirm and challenge the personal and political conversations around human bodies from the perspectives of thirty writers diverse in race, age, gender, size, sexuality, health, ability, geography, and class—a brilliant group probing and speaking their own truths about their bodies and identities, refusing to submit to others’ expectations about how their bodies should look, function, and behave.
Covering a wide range of experiences—from art modeling as a Black woman to nostalgia for a brutalizing high school sport, from the frightening upheaval of cancer diagnoses to the small beauties of funeral sex—this collection is intelligent, sensitive, and unflinchingly candid. Through the power of personal narratives, as told by writers at all stages of their careers, Body Language reflects the many ways in which we understand and inhabit our bodies.
Featuring essays by A.E. Osworth, Andrea Ruggirello, Aricka Foreman, Austin Gilkeson, Bassey Ikpi, Bryan Washington, Callum Angus, Destiny O. Birdsong, Eloghosa Osunde, Forsyth Harmon, Gabrielle Bellot, Haley Houseman, Hannah Walhout, Jenny Tinghui Zhang, Jess Zimmerman, Kaila Philo, Karissa Chen, Kayla Whaley, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Marcos Gonsalez, Marisa Crane, Melissa Hung, Natalie Lima, Nina Riggs, Rachel Charlene Lewis, Ross Showalter, s.e. smith, Sarah McEachern, Taylor Harris, and Toni Jensen.
We encourage masks at this event.
Matt Ortile is the author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name and the co-editor of the nonfiction anthology Body Language. He is also the executive editor of Catapult magazine and was previously the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. He has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and MacDowell, has taught writing workshops at Kundiman and Catapult, and has written for Esquire, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Out magazine, and BuzzFeed News, among others. He is a graduate of Vassar College, which means he now lives in Brooklyn.
Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Catapult, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published in February 2022 from Grand Central Publishing. During July 2022, she will be the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark.
Forsyth Harmon is the author and illustrator of the illustrated novel Justine. She is also the illustrator of national bestseller Girlhood by Melissa Febos and The Art of the Affair by Catherine Lacey. Forsyth’s work has been featured in Granta, BOMB, Refinery29, The Believer, and more. She received both a BA and an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in New York.
Haley E.D. Houseman is a nonfiction writer with a focus on communities of humans (and nonhumans.) She's passionate about how we construct narratives about the natural world and our place in it, and how we craft material culture in relationship to each other. She is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of HumanxNature, an anthology of unconventional nature writing.
Haley E.D. Houseman is a nonfiction writer with a focus on communities of humans (and nonhumans.) She's passionate about how we construct narratives about the natural world and our place in it, and how we craft material culture in relationship to each other. She is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of HumanxNature, an anthology of unconventional nature writing.
Andrea Ruggirello's writing appears or is forthcoming in Joyland, Redivider, Hobart, Gay Magazine, The Baltimore Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and other places. She was a semi-finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and attended the Tin House Winter Novel Workshop. She holds an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University. Andrea was born in Korea, adopted and raised in New York City, and now lives in Brooklyn.
Hannah Walhout is a nonfiction writer and a senior print editor at Travel + Leisure. She is also a founding co-editor of the online lit mag Headway Quarterly, a 2019 finalist in the CLMP Firecracker Awards for best debut magazine. She is currently a second-year MFA candidate in creative writing at The New School.
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