UChicagoReads features books written by UChicago staff, faculty, students, and alumni or those written about University topics. Do you know of a book we should feature? Do you have a book of your own? Email us at uchicagointranet@uchicago.edu.

In honor of Women’s History Month, this edition of UChicago Reads features books by women about women. Each selection by two UChicago faculty and an alumnus focuses on a different aspect of the female experience, ranging in genre from memoir to fiction to poetry.

The Unfortunates

J K Chukwu
© 2023 | 305 pages

Synopsis

Sahara is not okay. Entering her sophomore year at Elite University, she feels like a failure: her body is too curvy, her love life is nonexistent, her family is disappointed in her, her grades are terrible, and, well, the few Black classmates she has just keep dying. Sahara is close to giving up, herself: her depression is, as she says, her only “Life Partner.”

And this narrative—taking the form of an irreverent, piercing “thesis” to the university committee that will judge her—is meant to be a final unfurling of her singular, unforgettable voice before her own inevitable disappearance and death. But over the course of this wild sophomore year, and supported by her eccentric community of BIPOC women, Sahara will eventually find hope, answers, and an unexpected redemption.

About the author

J K (Jennifer) Chukwu is a writing and research advisor in the University of Chicago’s Program in Creative Writing, part of the Department of English Language and Literature. In her writing, Chukwu focuses on generational and racial trauma, toxicity in gender dynamics, performance, and mental health. Chukwu was a 2019 Lambda Fellow and her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, and TAYO. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and was short-listed for the 2020 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. Chukwu has presented her writing and art at University of Wisconsin-Madison, UC Berkeley, National Louis University, the University of Manchester, among others.

Uterotopia: Poems

Rachel Galvin
© 2023 | 64 pages

Synopsis

In Uterotopia, Rachel Galvin explores the nuances of femininity with wit and humor just as complex as the subjects of her poetry. Delving into fertility and aging, and sexism and mortality, Galvin dauntlessly brings us in and out of the home shining a bright light on what bystanders choose to look away from. Her third poetry book, Uterotopia is a sharp collection centering on the woman’s experience in a post-Roe America.

About the author

Rachel Galvin is the director of undergraduate studies for the Program in Creative Writing and an associate professor in the Department of English and Literature at the University of Chicago. Gavin is a scholar, poet, and translator specializing in 20th- and 21st-Century comparative poetics in English, Spanish, and French. Her research and teaching interests include comparative modernisms, hemispheric studies, US Latinx literature, wartime literature, multilingual poetics, the Oulipo, and translation theory and practice. Her collections of poetry include Elevated Threat Level (2018), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Alice James Books’ Kinereth Genseler Award, Pulleys & Locomotion (2009), and a chapbook, Zoetrope (2006).

We Are Too Many

Hannah Pittard
© 2023 | 224 pages

Synopsis

In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been sleeping with her charismatic best friend, Trish. These time-jumping exchanges are fast-paced, intimate, and often jaw-dropping in their willingness to reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. Blending fact and fiction, sometimes re-creating exchanges with extreme accuracy and sometimes diving headlong into pure speculation, Pittard takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with―from the depths of female rage to the heartbreaking ways we inevitably outgrow certain people.

We Are Too Many examines the ugly, unfiltered parts of the female experience, as well as the many (happier) possibilities in starting any life over after a major personal catastrophe.

About the author

Hannah Pittard, AB’01, came to the University of Chicago to focus on literary criticism, but she couldn’t stop writing fiction. She drafted letters to high school friends and her then boyfriend on a typewriter she brought to campus. Rereading the letters years later she realized half of them were complete fiction. Years later, Pittard still finds herself obsessed with all sorts of real-world scenarios—and she still turns those ruminations into fiction. Learn more about her writing style in this article from UChicago Magazine. We Are Too Many is Pittard’s first of the non-fiction variety. Her four previous novels have been recommended by the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, O (the Oprah Magazine), Time, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Belletrist, Powell’s Indie Subscription Club, and others. She is the winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and a MacDowell Colony Fellow.