SANTA BARBARA — The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present “What You Become in Flight: A Conversation with Ellen O’Connell Whittet (via Zoom)” at 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 16.
In this searingly raw and graceful first book, author Ellen O’Connell Whittet explores both the joy of learning to jump and the safety of landing. Sorrow, violence, love, fear, hunger, and pain run through this memoir that critics have called “enthralling,” “poignant,” and “exquisite.” Join the author for a conversation that opens out the personal to the universal questions of self-worth, the desire to disappear, the loss and reclamation of our own voice, and what it feels like to look at a body and see a story.
Purchase a copy of What You Become in Flight at the Museum Store, both in-person and online at sbmastore.net.
Get tickets at tickets.sbma.net.
Ellen O’Connell Whittet is an essayist and lecturer who teaches in the Writing Program at UC Santa Barbara. Her memoir about coming of age in ballet, What You Become in Flight, was published by Melville House in April 2020.
Ellen has written for Paris Review, Buzzfeed, Vulture, The Atlantic, New York City Ballet, Allure, Teen Vogue, The Rumpus, Lenny Letter, Bustle, Catapult, Literary Hub, Salon, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, where she won the Virginia Faulkner Award, Redivider, The Nashville Review, the Harper Perennial Anthology The Moment (2012), and on the Ploughshares Blog. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.