Get ready for Halloween at this reading with author Colin Dickey and his new book, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.
Dickey’s fascination with huanted places was piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes.” Dickey then set off to visit cities across America to investigate the legends, decode and unpack vital histories cloaked in superstition, in our most famous haunted places. In the book that follows, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living, paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone.
As a writer, scholar, speaker, and co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology, Colin Dickey has established himself as an exciting new voice among American cultural historians. Dickey’s work, on everything from mourning practices, to failed Arctic expeditions, to conspiracy theories about musical tuning, has been anthologized and published widely, at Lapham’s Quarterly, BOMB, The Paris Review, The New Inquiry, and many others. He is a member of the Order of the Good Death, a collective of artists, writers, and death industry professionals interested in improving the Western world’s relationship with mortality. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, and is an associate professor of creative writing at National University.