Mitchell S. Jackson and Leslie Jamison: I Feel Your Pain (2016)

This event happened on March 21st 2016 at the Folger Theatre.

Mitchell S. Jackson's novel The Residue Years, the winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, is based on his own coming-of-age, in a Portland, Oregon, neighborhood harrowed by the crack cocaine epidemic. Leslie Jamison's widely-lauded essay collection The Empathy Exams starts with her own memories of working as a model patient for medical students and goes on to explore how we perceive other people's pain. Both writers investigated the extremes of experience-- their own and others'-- in dazzling fiction and essays.