Talk | Politics of Poetics: Molly McCully Brown and Matt Bodett

About the Event

Politics of Poetics brings poet Molly McCully Brown to the MCA for a reading followed by a conversation with Chicago-based artist and Director of the Center for Mad Culture, Matt Bodett.

McCully Brown read a selection of her work including poems from her critically acclaimed debut collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017). The Colony, located 15 miles from where McCully Brown grew up, was deeply involved in the eugenics movement in the first half of the 20th century. She discusses a shared interest in researching psychologically and politically charged sites as sources of inspiration for new narratives and understandings of disability and mental health past and present in the US with artist Matt Bodett—who recently published Dunning: Special Report, a book on the Cook County Asylum.

Politics of Poetics is a series of workshops, readings, and conversations highlighting contemporary poets whose practices traverse the political in writing, teaching, and activism.

Access Information

English CART captioning is available for this talk.

To request additional accessibility services like ASL interpretation or audio description, please contact us via email at [email protected] or call 312-397-4076.

About the Speakers

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body (Persea Books, 2020; Faber & Faber, 2021) and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020).

McCully Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Raised in rural Virginia, she is a graduate of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Stanford University, and the University of Mississippi, where she received her MFA. She lives and teaches in Laramie, Wyoming, where she is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Wyoming.
 

Matt Bodett received his MFA from Boise State University in 2011 and moved to Chicago in 2013, where he has been a prominent advocate for disability and mad culture. In 2022, he founded the Center for Mad Culture, dedicated to exploring and amplifying the voices of those identifying with madness. Bodett currently teaches at Loyola University Chicago and serves on the board of the Good Hart Artist Residency.

As a visual artist, poet, and performer, Bodett’s work has been featured locally at venues including Steppenwolf Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater, The Poetry Foundation, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, and internationally at the Freud Museum in London, the No Limits Festival in Berlin, and others. His practice interrogates his lived experiences with madness, connecting Western art-historical ideals to contemporary understandings of madness as a viable identity. Bodett is driven by a belief in the transformative power of art to challenge societal narratives, foster empathy, and create space for mad voices in cultural conversations.