PEN America World Voices Festival – The Lives of Animals: The False Divide Between Humans and Non-Humans

Humans are animals who do not think they are animals. How did we grow blind to the astonishing gifts of our kind? 

Sangamithra Iyer’s new book, Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed, reckons lyrically with the ways bodies—human, animal, water—are controlled and liberated. In her novel, Only a Little While Here (tr. Heather Cleary), Colombian author María Ospina celebrates animals’ often-overlooked status as witnesses of our shared world, training our attention on the lives of five creatures, including a migratory songbird dazzled by city lights. Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories chronicles the deep strangeness of the zoo and considers the work of, among others, John Berger and Franz Kafka in a series of essays exploring mortality, alienation, boredom, and surveillance. 

In conversation with Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature), these authors will challenge the arbitrary borders between the human and non-human worlds.

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