Kristen Radtke
2025 Walter R. Smith Visiting Scholar Series
Featuring: Kristen Radtke
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 | 7:00 pm
SUNY Corning Community College | Main Dining Room
Click here to learn more about the Walter R. Smith Visiting Scholar Series and past events.
Kristen Radtke is the author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017). She is the creative director of The Verge. The recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant, her work has been nominated
for a PEN/Jean Stein Award, an Eisner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie
Metal, and numerous National Magazine Awards. Her comics and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Marie Claire, The Atlantic,
Elle, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and many other places.
There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often
misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the
smallest of towns.
In Seek You, Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves,
Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the
distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art,
Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels
impossible to share.
Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling
cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage
with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally-charged
drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on
some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces
between us from splitting entirely.
Radtke received an MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. She is the former managing editor of Sarabandc Books and is currently the art director at the Verge. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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Register for the 2025 Walter R. Smith Visiting Scholar Series, featuring Kristen Radtke
Registration closes on Monday, April 7th
This event is free and open to the public
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 | 7:00 pm
SUNY Corning Community College / Main Dining Room - Commons Building and streamed live via Zoom
Contact CCC Development Foundation Office for more information