Author Kristen Radtke to Address Issues Surrounding Loneliness at USM University Forum March 19
Fri, 03/08/2024 - 04:06pm | By: David Tisdale
How Americans manage the impacts of feeling alone and isolated will be addressed by Kristen Radtke at the second University of Southern Mississippi (USM) University Forum Series program of the spring 2024 semester Tuesday, March 19 at 6:30 p.m. in Bennett Auditorium on the Hattiesburg campus with her presentation “Alone with Kristen Radtke.” Admission is free and the public is invited.
Radtke is an award-winning writer, illustrator, and graphic memoirist and the author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, winner of the 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In Seek You, Radtke examines the phenomenon of loneliness in America through the lens of her own experiences while also employing neuroscience, sociology, and mass culture to explore how Americans seek connections and often fail. Of Radtke’s work, Publishers Weekly described it as “innovative in form and painfully relevant in content. . . For a treatise about the perils of being alone, it creates a wonderful sense of being drawn into conversation.”
Seek You was shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction,
while also earning best book of the year recognition from National Public Radio (NPR),
TIME Magazine, The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, and The Los Angeles Times. Radtke is also the creative director of The Verge; her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and the Oxford American, among other publications.
“Radtke has reinvented the graphic novel, making it both personal and scholarly,”
said Dr. Andrew Haley, director of University Forum and an associate professor of
history. “Keeping with Forum’s historical mission, she asks us to reexamine the American
experience - in this case, a culture that imposes loneliness - and asks if we can
do better. This Forum address will surprise you.”
he USM Honors College. Learn more about University Forum.