Join The Georgia Review and UGA’s MFA program in Narrative Media Writing for a special event with author Kristal Brent Zook.

For more than twenty years, Dr. Kristal Brent Zook has reported on social issues such as health, education, culture, politics, race, gender, and the environment. She is an award-winning journalist and author of four books, including The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, a coming-of-age story about being biracial in America, searching for her missing white father, and finding one’s authentic identity. In 2023, it was chosen as a favorite book by Vanity Fair, BET, PEOPLE, Ms., and The Root, and received praise in The New York Times Book Review and Kirkus. A former contributor to the Washington Post and ESSENCE, Dr. Zook’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, LIFE, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is currently working on an in-depth essay about the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre of 1921 for The Georgia Review. Dr. Zook is a professor of journalism at Hofstra University in New York.  

UGA’s low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction, part of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, is designed for students who want to develop their research, reporting, and writing skills to take on topics of national and global importance. Students explore long-form storytelling in research-based narratives that rise to the level of literature. Many of them are mid-career journalists and other industry professionals who want to elevate their careers and write a book. This program paves the way for nonfiction writers to use their talents and skills to engage the world. Learn more here. 

Join us at the Lamar Dodd School of Art for an artist talk with New York-based artist, Rose Salane, who will discuss her thinking and process behind her exhibition Eclipse Or, Fission on display at the Athenaeum.

Rose Salane is an artist living and working in New York, NY. In her practice, Salane places systems of value and exchange alongside sentiment and loss to reflect on the conditions that shape life in cities. Solo presentations of Salane’s work have been held at Tank Shanghai, CN (2024); Carlos/Ishikawa, UK (2023); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2021); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2019). In 2021, her work was featured in the New Museum Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, NY, and in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In 2022, she was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Salane completed her MA in Urban Planning at Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY, and her BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Join us in celebrating New York-based artist, Rose Salane's newly commissioned exhibition "Fission or, Eclipse."

Rose Salane is an artist who uses seemingly mundane objects to explicate systems of evaluation, exchange, and organization that shape daily life. In this exhibition, she arranges collected items of disparate origin from personal and bureaucratic archives—the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta History Center, the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services—to better understand historic cycles through an object’s recovery and storage. 

The works in this exhibition offer an oblique view on tumultuous historical shifts: A series of diary entries describing an eclipse during the last year of the Civil War; a 1947 solicitation letter from Albert Einstein to academic institutions asking for the contribution of funding towards nuclear fission and atomic energy research; a set of decommissioned traffic light lenses suggesting a city grid in disarray. Together these object sets form dynamic intersections across time, war, observation, and power; their narrative contingencies underscoring the politics of the archive. 

Challenging viewers to find commonalities and disjunctions among the exhibition’s many parts, Salane also raises profound questions about the voices and objects charged with telling our histories: Whose thoughts, whether mundane or profound, have been preserved for future generations? What objects, though silent, speak on our behalf, and whose job is the work of their translation? Salane’s exhibition, a translation in its own right, is also a careful curation that uses the methods of the archive to put its limitations and potential on display.

Rose Salane is an artist living and working in New York, NY. Solo presentations of Salane’s work have been held at Tank Shanghai, CN (2024); Carlos/Ishikawa, UK (2023); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2021); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2019). In 2021, her work was featured in the New Museum Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, NY, and in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In 2022, she was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Salane completed her MA in Urban Planning at Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY, and her BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

As a 31-year-old delicatessen clerk searching for love, laughter and a well-balanced lunch, Nebraska-based artist, Ella Weber will share what’s behind the counter in her debut novel, The Deli Diaries. Struggling to find purpose slicing meat, three existential slices of ham hover above. Who ham I? What ham I? Where ham I? Across the counter, Weber blurs the line between employee and customer, performance and reality, art and life. Join us for the author's performative artist lecture, presented as a Stand-Up Comedy-Microsoft PowerPoint-TED Talk-poetry reading.

Ella Weber is a basement-based artist who uses humor, performance, and storytelling within her practice. Playfully upending the existential fabrics of daily life, Weber transforms her minimum-wage day jobs into her studio. Beyond the studio, she has attended residencies at MASS MoCA, The NARS Foundation, Rogers Art Loft, Munson, Ox-Bow School of Art, The Wassaic Project, and Anderson Ranch. The artist has exhibited in group exhibitions at IPCNY (New York, NY), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and Contemporary Arts Center, (Cincinnati, OH). Recent solo shows include exhibitions at Munson (Utica, NY), The Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), and Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND). Weber received an MFA from the University of Kansas and resides in Omaha, Nebraska.