Writing as Resistance: a public talk by Chris Hedges
Public Energy and The Precarious Festival Present
November 20, 2017 @ 7:30 PM
Market Hall Performing Arts Centre, 140 Charlotte St.
Tickets:
$15 in advance, available at markethall.org, or pay-what-you-can at the door.
Meet and greet with Chris Hedges
Prior to the talk in support of Public Energy and the Precarious ArtsWORK Festival: 6PM – 7PM at Catalina’s on Hunter Street. Cost: $75, available in advance at markethall.org. This ticket includes a charitable tax receipt for $60, recognizing your support for Public Energy’s work in the community, including the Precarious Festival.
The outspoken American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges will speak on his life and work as a writer, engaging head on with some of the most contentious issues of our time. The talk is held in conjunction with Precarious: Peterborough ArtsWORK Festival. Chris will engage in a Q&A with the audience following the talk.
Hedges is a leading writer and activist on the American left, whose uncompromising, erudite journalism targets both sides of the political spectrum, exposing the myriad ways that America’s ruling classes have failed the country, and the world.
Hedges has also written eloquently about the role of the artist in society. In his article The Artist as Prophet, which surveys a range of writers from the novelist Russell Banks to the poet Anna Akhmatova, he concludes,“The artist, if true to his or her vocation, recovers the past and explains the present. The artist is the true chronicler of who we were and where we came from. Culture, in times of distress, is not a luxury but a life raft.”
Hedges has recently broadened his work into theatre: he is collaborating on a new play, Caged, with prisoners he recently taught at a maximum-security prison in New Jersey. He talks about that experience, and provides gut wrenching excerpts from the play, in his article The Play’s the Thing.
About Chris Hedges
A writer, activist and Pulitzer-prize winner, Chris Hedges is one of the great moral voices of our age. His essays draw on his extraordinary experiences as a journalist – in the U.S and more than 50 countries – but also his conviction that the centers of power in America have been seized and hijacked by corporations, something the American media pays deference to. He currently writes a weekly column for the web site Truthdig, is the Emmy-nominated host of On Contact on RT America, and has taught a class through Princeton University at a state prison in New Jersey which has resulted in a play about mass incarceration created with prisoners, Caged, due to premiere in May, 2018.
Chris Hedges’s talk is sponsored in part by Traill College at Trent University and the Trent University departments of History, Cultural Studies, English, and Political Studies.
