Named one the Ten Best Books of 2017 by the New York Times, Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy (Riverhead Books) is an unforgettable memoir of growing up in a family with a guitar-shredding priest for a father. Lockwood’s father, a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism after watching The Exorcist in a submarine, what he claims was the “deepest conversion on record.” Having received a rare dispensation from the authorities, Lockwood’s father became that rare thing—a married Catholic priest—and Lockwood herself “a human loophole.” Both hilarious and deeply moving, Priestdaddy is ultimately an exploration of our divided and contradictory world, in language so exuberant that it seems to bless everything it names.
Patricia Lockwood is also the author of two collections of poetry, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (Penguin, 2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, London Review of Books, Tin House and Poetry.
Lockwood is one of CAHI’s Distinguished Speakers, and this event is also the annual Susan Gubar Lecture, which is co-sponsoring Lockwood’s appearance.
The College of Arts