IN PERSON - Robert Lunday - DISEQUILIBRIA

Brazos Bookstore will host Robert Lunday in person on Friday, April 7 at 6:30pm.

Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize

Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author's stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family's experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather's case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.

Robert Lunday received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1980, and later completed graduate degrees at the University of Houston (MA 1985, Ph.D. 2002). He has been a two-time fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center (1986-87, 1988-89), a St. Albans School Writer in Residence in Washington, D.C. (1987-88), and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1989-91). In 2002 he was awarded a Brazos Bookstore/Academy of American Poets Prize and a Barthelme/Inprint Award for Nonfiction Writing. His first book, Mad Flights, a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters First-Book Award, was published in 2002 by Ashland Poetry Press. His second book, Gnome, was the first volume published by Black Sun Lit in 2017, and was named one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2017” by Entropy magazine. While has taught English at Houston Community College for 22 years, and owned a horse farm with his wife, Yukiko Lunday.