Prince Party! (IN PERSON)
Live music. Readings. Dancing. It’s time to put on your finest and flashiest outfits and head to the American Writers Museum for a celebration of all things Prince! Enjoy live music performed by Gabriel Sanchez, lead singer of the Prince tribute band The Prince Experience. Then, author Peter Coviello reads from his new book Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things, a collection of essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people in an age of accelerating disaster.
Sequins, platform heels, and purple are not required but are strongly encouraged.
This is an in-person event at the American Writers Museum. This program will also be livestreamed, and you can register for the link to the online broadcast here.
About Gabriel Sanchez and The Prince Experience:
Since 2002 Gabriel Sanchez has been portraying Prince in his critically acclaimed show The Prince Experience. What started off as a small local theatre production of Purple Rain, has expanded into what has become a night of unbelievable entertainment, that keeps anyone who has seen it, talking long after the last encore is played.
About Is There God After Prince?
This is a book about loving things—books, songs, people—in the shadow of a felt, looming disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute, romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him, we reencounter movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.
Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls “endstrickenness,” he asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow, Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of “Last Things.”
Peter Coviello is the author of five previous books, including Tomorrow’s Parties, a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Award in LGBT Studies; Long Players, a memoir selected as one of Artforum’s Ten Best Books of 2018; and Make Yourselves Gods, also published by the University of Chicago Press. His essays have appeared in Frieze, Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Raritan, Elle, and Believer, among other publications. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.