VIRTUAL - Gina Nutt - NIGHT ROOMS

This event will be hosted on Zoom. Click here to register.

Gina Nutt will be in conversation with Sara Rose Etter.

Night Rooms is a poetic, intimate collection of personal essays that weaves together fragmented images from horror films and cultural tropes to meditate on anxiety and depression, suicide, body image, identity, grief, and survival.

Whether competing in shopping mall beauty pageants, reflecting on childhood monsters and ballet lessons, or recounting dark cultural ephemera while facing grief and authenticity in the digital age, Gina Nutt’s shifting style echoes the sub-genres that Night Rooms highlights—spirit-haunted slow burns, possession tales, slashers, and revenge films with a feminist bent.

Refracting life through the lens of horror films, Night Rooms masterfully leaps between reality and movies, past and present—because the “final girl’s” story is ultimately a survival story told another way.

"Gina Nutt's Night Rooms is a startling collection of 18 essays ruminating on life experiences, cultural tropes and horror films, examining questions of gender, fear and grief. Fragmented in form, but firmly interconnected, these essays refuse to look away. Nutt's prose is lyrical, provocative, intimate and intelligent... Together, these pieces form an experience that is sensory, intellectual and emotional, illuminating difficult and even uncomfortable truths." —Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness

Gina Nutt is the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and other publications. She lives in Ithaca, NY.

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party, and The Book of X, her first novel, which is the winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award for novel. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, The Cut, VICE, and more. She has been awarded residences at the Jack  Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland. In 2017, she was the keynote speaker at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in Bordeaux, France, where she presented on surrealist writing as a mode of feminism. She earned her B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University and her M.F.A. in Fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Austin, TX.