About this Event
Join us for an evening with , author of , a riveting exploration of illness and medicine that imagines a more humane form of care.
“What was wrong with them? That’s what we wanted to know.” So begins Jonathan Gleason’s prizewinning collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, Gleason illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, and the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness. With sharp analysis and boundless empathy, Gleason shows how medicine is shaped by cultural narratives, historical contexts, and the complicated people who practice it.
In her foreword, Meghan O’Rourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that “illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome. But as Gleason’s work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the precarious beauty of that knowing, and to the ways it connects us—to history, to culture, to one another.”
Jonathan Gleason is the author of , a collection of essays exploring the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape medicine. Meghan O'Rourke selected the "layered, reflective, and unusually poised debut" as the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize. A 2023 Elizabeth George Grant Recipient and 2024 Granum Foundation finalist, Gleason's work has also appeared in the Best American Essays (2024), The Sun Magazine, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. He teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1620 Orrington Ave, 1620 Orrington Avenue, Evanston, United States
USD 0.00
