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The Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program presents Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor Tisa Bryant, author of Unexplained Presence , in conversation with NWP Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Minor, author of Slim Confessions.

Brenda Coultas says of Unexplained Presence, “This is truly a bold book, one that combines scenes of rich technicolor with the light of truth, at once invoking and dissolving cultural myths and faux histories.”

Douglas Kearney writes, “Slim Confessions stretches—assimilating an account of birthing lambs in Iceland, analyses of “the Blob” horror genre cum cumshots, and a dive into adolescent thwocking—without tearing. This is smart, brisk writing, overflowing with potent, pungent sensuousness and vicious, viscous dirt.

Tisa Bryant earned her MFA in creative writing from Brown University in 2004, and she is currently director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), her first full-length book, is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from film, literature and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. An excerpt from her novella, [the curator], was published by Belladonna Books in 2009, in a companion volume with writer Chris Kraus. She is also the author of the chapbook, Tzimmes (A+Bend Press, 2000), a prose poem collage of narratives including a Barbados genealogy, a Passover seder, and a film by Yvonne Rainer.

Sarah Minor holds a PhD in creative nonfiction writing from Ohio University and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the Noemi Press Book Award for Prose (2021), Bright Archive, a collection of visual essays (Rescue Press, 2020), and The Persistence of the Bonyleg, selected by Joseph Harrington for the Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest (2016). She has also published numerous essays, reviews, and scholarly articles.