New Territories: Migration and Exile

The poet Amit Majmudar says this, “You’ve come of age in the age of migrations./ The board tilts, and the bodies roll west./ Fanaticism’s come back into fashion,/ come back with a vengeance./ In this new country, there’s no gravitas,/ no grace…” This lecture will be about the literature  of migration and exile. From the Book of Exodus to Ovid’s Poetry of Exile, writers have long examined what it means to leave one’s country, to migrate to the unknown. We’ll look at how these migrations shape characters into new territories and internal spaces. What does migration and exile mean to us as humans? Any journey that has a geographical and social repositioning asks us to reconsider ourselves, to examine not only the self, but the other.

Bio: Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She earned her MA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA at the University of Houston. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. She teaches at Colorado State University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. In 2019-2020, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship.