Personal Limits is a conversation series with critics, authors, and poets about contemporary experiments in personal writing amidst our ongoing and overlapping crises hosted by Prof. Monica Huerta.

In the second half of this series, conversations turn from Professor Huerta’s own book Magical Habits to her guests’ writing and their thoughts about as well as desires for contemporary landscapes of personal writing. 

Monica Huerta is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. Her first book is Magical Habits, in which the author draws on her experiences growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Her forthcoming book is titled The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism. 

Namwali Serpell is an American and Zambian writer and professor of English at Harvard. She is an award-winning writer of short stories and the author of the novel The Old Drift. She is also the author of a book of essays, Stranger Faces, and a work of criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Forthcoming is a book titled American Psycho-Analysis.

Registration information and link: https://monicahuertaphd.com/PersonalLimits

This series is a collaboration among Labyrinth Books, The Princeton Public Library, and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Humanities Council, English Department, and Program in American Studies.