Episode 181: Infertilities, A Curation – Elizabeth Horn, Maria Novotny, and Robin Silbergleid
Elizabeth Horn is a health care communicator and the cofounder and codirector of The ART of Infertility, for which she has curated more than thirty exhibits since its inception in 2014. The ART of Infertility was the 2018 recipient of the Hope Award for Innovation given by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association for its work communicating patient experiences through arts programming. Horn lives with her family in Ann Arbor, MI.
Maria Novotny is an Assistant Professor of English at UW-Milwaukee. Her research considers how reproductive health patients advocate for care. Invested in community issues related to infertility, she co-edited the anthology Infertilities, A Curation (published by WSUP) which puts into practice “story as theory” by featuring visual and written narratives from over 60 contributors – each of whom self-identify as infertile. Other scholarship related to her community-engaged research and teaching has been published in the Community Literacy Journal, Reflections, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, TCQ and more. For the last 10 years, she has co-directed The ART of Infertility.
Robin Silbergleid is a poet and nonfiction writer; She is the author of several books that are centrally concerned with infertility and recurrent reproductive loss, as well as single motherhood. Her current research project is a monograph tentatively titled Queer Mother Memoirs: Experiments in Life/Narrative that offers a hybrid critical-creative analysis of contemporary memoirs by and about queer mothers. Born and raised in Illinois, she holds both a PhD in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. She is currently a professor of English and associate chair for undergraduate studies at Michigan State University. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan.