Writer, critic, performer, & visual artist James Hannaham talks about his latest and most uncategorizable book Pilot Impostor. This book slips between the borders of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, facts and fake news, selfhood and persona, pretending and privilege. And Pilot Impostor comes into being piece by piece through an engagement with the work, poem by poem, of Fernando Pessoa, a writer who created and wrote from over seventy (!!!) different heteronyms (personas that interacted with each other and had full biographies, from a bisexual naval engineer in Scotland to an uneducated Portuguese shepherd trying to unlearn even more). And yet this book of Hannaham’s is also somehow about Trump, air disasters, the nature of selfhood, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism and slavery. How is this all possible? Well, listen in to find out!
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