The Persistance of the Past

Heather Clark and Angela Woodward
Saturday, November 7, 2026
12pm, Veterans Gallery
The past has a way of trickling forward through scraps, notes, and pictures that tell or twist a story, calling into question the “self” one makes of these pieces. Fortunately, that’s a question thoughtful literary fiction is ready to ask. Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook, inspired by a World War II scrapbook hidden in an attic by the author’s grandfather, follows an intense love affair in the present that is haunted by history and family memory. Angela Woodward’s Afterlife offers a meditation on grief, memory, and dreams in the vein of W. G. Sebald or Anne Carson—a genre-blurring look at how humans define themselves by things of the world, and how the world haunts them back.
About the Authors

Heather Clark earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography; a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship; a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York; and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library. A former Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath; The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. Red Comet was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography, and was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021. Red Comet was also a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times (London), The Daily Telegraph, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, The Times of India, Trouw (Netherlands), and elsewhere, and has been translated into five languages. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, and The Times Literary Supplement. She lives outside of New York City.

Angela Woodward is the author of the novels Afterlife, Ink, Natural Wonders (winner of the Fiction Collective Two Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize), and End of the Fire Cult. Her other works include Origins and Other Stories, winner of the Collagist Magazine prose chapbook competition, and the collection The Human Mind. Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and been included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web collection. Her work has won statewide awards from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and the Illinois Arts Council. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.