Marquis Salon Lecture: Elsewhere: On Enchantment & Precarity of American Orphanhood

Bio

Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, was published with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in April 2022 and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award. She earned her PhD from USC in Literature and Creative Writing. Her extensive reporting on the child welfare system appears in the Netflix docuseries The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez. Melissa is a worker lover and through her own work and literary citizenship strives to upend economic violence. Her mother taught her how to sharpen a pencil with a knife, and she’s basically been doing that ever since.