The Leftovers

Winner of the 2017 CSU Poetry Center Essay Collection Competition, Selected by Renee Gladman. Winner of CLMP's 2019 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. Both a response to and a continuation of The Dinner Party, the iconic 1979 installation produced by feminist artist Judy Chicago, Shaelyn Smith's wide-ranging and imaginative debut essay collection The Leftovers breaks ground for memoir while sharply challenging what "art writing" is and can be. With doses of lyric and critical review, feminist theory and art history, food writing and experimental journalism, Smith's (auto)biographical prose carves new routes through and beyond traditional modes of criticism and ekphrasis to arrive at the place where art merges with lived experience.