Thalia Field and Anakana Schofield - Personhood (New Directions)

Anakana Schofield joins Thalia Field for a conversation about her latest experimental work on animal rights, Personhood (New Directions).
This event, recorded on May 5, 2021, was presented in conjunction with Community Bookstore in Park Slope.
About Personhood
A remarkable and moving cross-genre work about animal rights by one of America’s foremost experimental writers
Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the "invasive species crisis," Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.
About the writers
Thalia Field is Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University. Her most recent novel is Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) from Solid Objects Press. Her three New Directions books are Point and Line (2000), Incarnate: Story Material (2004), and Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010).
Anakana Schofield is an award-winning Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Her novels include Malarky (2012) and Martin John (2015) and Bina (2021). The UK edition of Bina was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. Schofield lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.