Suzanne Scanlon will read from her intimate, unsparing chronicle of surviving mental illness, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen. She will be joined in conversation by Mieke Eerkens. “Suzanne Scanlon’s memoir Committed is a lyrical and illuminating account of a young woman’s struggle with mental illness and institutionalization. Mining the metaphors endemic to the institutional setting—the way madness or insanity is “a story the patients are told and learn to tell about themselves”—and making use of medical records and her own journals alongside literary depictions and descriptions of treatment, Scanlon questions the cultural conversations around women and mental illness, framing a compelling narrative of her own recovery and redemption.” —Natasha Trethewey

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of the novels Promising Young Women and Her 37th Year, An Index. Her writing has appeared in Granta, BOMB Magazine, The Iowa Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She is teaching for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival this summer.

Mieke Eerkens is an alum of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. She is the author of All Ships Follow Me, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, Pank, Guernica, and Creative Nonfiction, as well as in numerous anthologies.  She is teaching for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival this summer.