Join The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and Transit Books for a joint party and conversation on the intersection of art and the archive with authors Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Leah Mensch and oral historian Shanna Farrell. They’ll discuss how the archive functions within their current projects and why artists have long turned to archives—personal, institutional, forgotten, and imagined—not simply as repositories of the past but as living sites of inquiry, resistance, and reinvention. What does it mean to engage with history as an artist today? How do archives shape narrative, memory, and identity? And how might artists challenge, expand, or reimagine the archive itself?
All three authors are forthcoming contributors to The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and Transit Books—come for the conversation and stick around afterward for the drinks, snacks, and vibes from three local literary institutions during Bay Area Book Festival weekend.
Doors open at 5, conversation starts at 5:30.
RSVP HERE
Bios:
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. It was a winner of a California Book Award. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College. She lives in California.
Leah Mensch is an Arab Jewish artist and scholar interested in literary afterlives and ghost archives. Their work appears in publications like The Kenyon Review, North American Review, Guernica, and Ninth Letter, and their manuscript about Kate Braverman—and the official and mythical materials that survive her—has received support from Tin House. They live in Tucson, Arizona, and you can find them at leahmensch.com.
Shanna Farrell is an award-winning oral historian at UC Berkeley's Oral History Center, where she has worked since 2013. She is the author of two books, A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits and Bay Area Cocktails: A History of Culture, Community and Craft.