Writing Trauma

On January 29, 2024, Dr. Roxane Gay, the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers, moderated a panel discussion featuring authors Leslie Jamison, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Jacqueline Woodson, which explored what it means to write and read trauma, and how (or if) we can do so ethically and effectively.
Trauma is widely explored in contemporary writing but all too often, writers are careless in how they depict trauma. In such depictions, trauma serves as pornography-a way of titillating the reader, a lazy way of creating narrative tension. Readers see trauma as it unfolds but are rarely given a broader understanding of that trauma or its aftermath. And then there are the times when trauma is used as a narrative engine as if the trauma is inherently interesting simply because it has happened.
Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams; The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath; Make it Scream, Make it Burn; and The Gin Closet. Her next book, a memoir called Splinters, comes out in February 2024. She writes frequently for various publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the nonfiction writing program at Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Goliath. His previous fiction includes Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award; the Beasts Made of Night series; and the War Girls series. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His non-fiction includes the book (S)kinfolk and has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. He has earned degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies. He currently resides in Connecticut.
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than thirty books for young people and adults including Another Brooklyn, Red At The Bone, and The Day You Begin. She received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2023 E. B. White Award, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and was the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Her books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award and NAACP Image Award winner Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and Each Kindness. In 2018, she founded Baldwin for the Arts, a residency serving writers, composers, interdisciplinary, and visual artists of the Global Majority. Her most recent novel, Remember Us, is set in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
The Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair represents a collaboration between the Institute for Women’s Leadership, the School of Communication and Information, and the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the School of Arts and Science. To support the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair, visit iwl.rutgers.ed....