Writing the big impossible thing

Pulitzer on the Road comes to Chicago for a free evening event on Wednesday March 5, 2025 featuring three Pulitzer prize-honored authors: Pulitzer board member and 2007 Poetry winner Natasha Trethewey, 2024 Memoir winner Cristina Rivera Garza, and 2019 Fiction finalist Rebecca Makkai In this powerful and intimate discussion, the authors will discuss writing on life’s “big impossible thing.” Across their award-winning works of poetry, memoir and fiction, each of these authors have delved into stories of memories, trauma, and the ripple effects of grief. Join them for a conversation on craft and the creative process, the transformative power of literature, and how writing into a wound can lead to the light. A book signing will follow the event.

BIOGRAPHY

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Native Guard (2006)–for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize–and, most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018); a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); a memoir, Memorial Drive (2020) an instant New York Times Bestseller; and The House of Being (2024), a meditation on writing. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress and in 2022 she was the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. A Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, she has also served on the boards of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hollins University and, currently, the Pulitzer Prize. At Northwestern University she is Board of Trustees Professor of English.

Author, translator, critic, Cristina Rivera Garza‘s recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Hogarth Press, 2023), Pulitzer Prize 2024 and finalist of the National Book Award 2023; El invencible verano de Liliana (PRH, 2021), José Donoso International Award 2021 and Xavier Villaurrutia Award 2022, among others. The Taiga Syndrome, translated by Jill Levine and Aviva Kana (Dorothy Project, 2017) won the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award. Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 NBCC Awards in criticism. She is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Culler Distinguished Chair and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. Cristina Rivera Garza is a MacArthur Fellow 2020-2025. Her newest novel, Death Takes Me (Penguin, 2025), a dreamlike, genre-defying detective story comes out February 25th.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, The Great Believers, One of the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award, and was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.