Saved: Objects of the Dead (Artsuite 2023) is a collaborative book and project by artist Jody Servon and poet Lorene Delany-Ullman. We often come together in grief seeking connection, even with strangers, to acknowledge our human suffering. In Saved: Objects of the Dead, the authors explore the universality of how objects embody the emotions of loss and memory. Pairing photography and prose, the book chronicles the lives, deaths, and relationships of individuals whose objects are imbued with emotional and physical senses, then kept by loved ones as an affirmation of their former lives. This book combines objects and language with a sense of personal intimacy that addresses our human mortality.  

Reading and conversation with Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman moderated by poet Lynne Thompson. Audience questions are encouraged at the end of the discussion. Book signing and reception to follow. Masks are encouraged. 

About the Presenters: 

Jody Servon is an artist, curator, and educator whose work connects people through storytelling about our lived experiences. She was raised in New Jersey by public school educator parents who loved exploring, collecting, and hosting gatherings for their beloved cast of characters. Her family life and wide array of jobs, including donut filler, kids ski instructor, beach badge checker, and oncology unit clerk, provided her with opportunities to interact with all kinds of people at some of their best and worst moments. The wealth of stories she heard formed her interest in integrating people’s stories of love, loss, grief, joy, and more into her work. A firm believer in public education, she earned degrees in New Genre from The University of Arizona and in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She has exhibited, published and created projects in North America, Europe, and Asia. She lives in Western North Carolina with her family and is currently a professor and coordinator of the art management program at Appalachian State University. 

Lorene Delany-Ullman is a native Californian and received her MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine. Before embarking on a teaching career, she worked as a technical writer for a large aircraft company and a marketing research firm. Currently, she teaches composition to UC Irvine students, a profession that allows her to explore topics ranging from war and popular culture to the rhetoric of grief and mourning. Her book of prose poetry, Camouflage for the Neighborhood, won the 2011 Sentence Award. Her poems and nonfiction have been published in various anthologies and literary magazines. Because of her own life-threatening illnesses and after witnessing her father's gradual decline and death from Alzheimer's disease, Lorene understands how talking about our mortality is a complex yet necessary conversation. Through her collaboration with Jody on Saved: Objects of the Dead, Lorene continues to learn much about loss, memory, and life. She resides in Newport Beach, California, with her husband, Richard. 

Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize and the forthcoming Blue on a Blue Palette to be published by BOA Editions in Spring 2024. Thompson sits on the Boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Rosebud, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others.