Join Golan Moskowitz as he reads to us from his new book, Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (2020), and converses with leading scholars Jack Halberstam and Kenneth Kidd about the book’s implications for queer studies.

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), best known for his Where the Wild Things Are (1963), was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and culture. Raising the stakes of children’s books, he painted childhood with the dark realism and wild imagination of his own sensitive “inner child,” drawing on the queer and Jewish sensibilities that shaped his singular voice. Interweaving literary biography and cultural history, Wild Visionary follows Sendak from his parents’ Brooklyn home to spaces of creative growth and artistic vision—from neighborhood movie palaces to Hell’s Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and the Connecticut country home he shared with Eugene Glynn, his partner of more than fifty years. Moskowitz analyzes Sendak’s investment in the figure of the endangered child in symbolic relation to collective touchstones that impacted the artist’s perspective—the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis.

Registration on Eventbrite is required in order to receive the Zoom link on the day of the event.

Closed-captioning will be available.

Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $5.

All are welcome to join, with or without a donation.

You can make a donation when you register on Eventbrite.

Purchase Golan Y. Moskowitz’s Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context on or before Thursday, May 27th, 2021, and receive 25% off: $26.25 (regularly $35)

Participant biographies:

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012), and a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.

Kenneth Kidd is Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Children’s Literature and Culture. He’s the author of three monographs,Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale;Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature; and Theory for Beginners: Children’s Literature as Critical Thought. He has co-editedWild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism; Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature; Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards; and Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality. With Elizabeth Marshall he co-edits the Routledge series Children’s Literature and Culture.

Golan Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University, where he teaches courses on Jewish gender and sexuality, American pop culture, Holocaust studies, and comics and graphic novels. He is the author of Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020) and of several publications on intergenerational memory in post-Holocaust family narratives.