Please join International House Global Voices Program and Harris Public Policy as they welcome author Audrey Petty as she discusses her new book High Rise Stories.  Petty’s work is a series of first-person narratives from former residents of Chicago public housing. The event will feature a lecture and open dialogue with the opportunity to discuss the book with fellow attendees. The Diversity Luncheon brings local, national, and global conversation regarding social justice to the University of Chicago, and will also include comments by key Harris staff as well as representatives of Harris Student Organizations. This event is a part of Harris Public Policy’s Day One Welcome Week. Lunch will be provided.

Audrey Petty is a prominent author and educator. Her works of fiction have been published in journals such as African American Review, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, and The Massachusetts Review. Her poetry has been featured in Crab Orchard Review and Cimarron Review, and her essays have appeared in Saveur, ColorLines, The Southern Review, Oxford American, Cornbread Nation 4, Gravy, and the Best Food Writing anthology. She is the editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing, a book that shares complex stories of community, displacement, and survival. 

Petty has been awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Colony, the Richard Soref Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she’s been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and the Hewlett Foundation.

She has taught extensively in the fields of African American literature and creative writing. Formerly on faculty in the Creative Writing Programs at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Knox College, Petty has also been an instructor for the Education Justice Project, Project FYSH (Foster Youth Seen and Heard), and Continuing Studies Programs at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University. In 2015, she served as the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction at Northwestern. She currently teaches for the Illinois Humanities’ Odyssey Project and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, and she lives with her family in Chicago.

This event is free and open to the public. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Global Voices Lecture Series and is part of the Harris Public Policy’s Day One Welcome Week.