Book event with Mimi Khúc, author of “dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss”

Join an in-person and online conversation with author Mimi Khúc about her new creative-critical, genre-bending book on mental health and a pedagogy of unwellness, “dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss” (Duke University Press). Khúc will visit UIC’s Daley Library as part of her book tour, and the event will include ample time for conversation and questions. See full details about the event. You can find the Zoom link here.

What shifts if we recognize how we are all differentially unwell? What is the university’s role in that unwellness? Khúc’s project, “a plea and a prayer that we all survive,” asks us to move away from individualized, medicalized understandings of wellness to take up understandings that account for the ways racism and ableism structure our unwellness. It asks us to consider “how we can go on living while it hurts,” recognizing the power of community for care and transformation.

Khúc is an adjunct professor in disability studies at Georgetown University and co-editor of The Asian American Literary Review. She created the Asian American Tarot, a reimagined deck of tarot cards, and the Open in Emergency project, an ongoing national effort to develop mental-health arts programming at universities and community spaces.

The event is hosted by the UIC Disability Cultural Center, UIC Women’s Leadership and Resource Center, UIC Department of Disability and Human Development and Access Living’s Arts and Culture Project. Co-sponsors are the UIC Asian American Resource and Cultural Center, Asian American Student Academic Program, Global Asian Studies and Institute for the Humanities.