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2024 Schedule


The 2024 Richard Ellmann Lectures featured award-winning authors Natasha Trethewey and Fintan O’Toole speaking on the theme of “Writing Lives.” 

Please see the schedule below for full details. 

Sunday
March 3, 2024
4:00 - 5:00 P.M.
The House of Being: Why I Write

In this lecture, Natasha Trethewey traces the origins of her writing life through the inherited geography of her childhood and her need to create new metaphors to inhabit. She examines writing as a process of reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.

Monday
March 4, 2024
6:30 - 7:30 P.M.
Crediting Marvels: Experience, Imagination and the Biographer's Dilemma

In this lecture, Fintan O'Toole, who is working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney, reflects on the challenges of mapping the relationship between a writer's experiences on the one hand and the transmutations of life into imagery on the other. How can a biography reveal the roots of art in personal and public history without reducing it to the circumstances of its creation? How can it avoid, as Hamlet has it, plucking out the heart of the artistic mystery?

Tuesday
March 5, 2024
6:30 - 7:30 P.M.
Creativity Conversation
Ellmann Lectures Location
Schwartz Center for Performing Arts
1700 North Decatur Road
Atlanta, Georgia 30322

All events are located at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts on the Emory University Campus.

Campus Parking

Enter the parking deck from North Decatur Road.