Memoirist and publisher Mahler to visit campus March 14
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Marketing and Communications Manager | 405-744-7497 | egosney@okstate.edu
Oklahoma State University will welcome memoirist and publisher Kristine Langley Mahler to campus on March 14 to speak “On the Inquiry for Truth as a Civic Good.”
“Kristine’s visit is a unique professionalization opportunity for students in both our Creative Writing MFA and Ph.D. programs,” said creative writing Ph.D candidate Gage Saylor. “They will learn about the craft of nonfiction writing from an accomplished memoirist and get a glimpse into the publishing industry through Kristine’s work as director and publisher at Split/Lip Press.”
Mahler is the author of two nonfiction books, “A Calendar Is a Snakeskin” and “Curing Season: Artifacts.” She has received various awards for her books and has been featured in several book list recommendations. Mahler’s subject matter is an investigation of ancestry, spirituality and validity. She wants to use this event to encourage others to pursue this path.
“I’m a nonfiction writer whose work focuses on experimenting with the truth both in form and in content and I’m really looking forward to my Thursday evening talk about the inquiry for truth as a civic good,” Mahler said. “I’ll be speaking directly about my own search for truth, using my two nonfiction books as case studies, and extrapolating how we all can come to know both ourselves and our society better by reconsidering our experiences.”
Exploring her experiences, Mahler’s two books connect her search for truth into a legible path.
“‘Curing Season: Artifacts’ is a collection of essays-as-artifacts which reconsider my arrival as an adolescent in eastern North Carolina and critique what it means to belong, or to want to belong, to a community with societal problems embedded in its core,” Mahler said. “‘A Calendar is a Snakeskin’ follows a year when signs and symbols kept planting themselves in my path, pointing me toward a version of myself I knew I needed to grow into.”
The OSU campus community is invited to attend Mahler’s reading and speaking engagement at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 14, in the Edmon Low Library Browsing Room. It is free and open to the public. To learn more about the event, visit the library’s web page here.
Story By: Jade Dudley, CAS graduate assistant | jade.dudley@okstate.edu