4:30-5:30 p.m.: Feeding the Arts Dinner with Simon Wu ‘17

Current Princeton students are invited to join writer and art curator Simon Wu ‘17 for a private dinner and career conversation. Dinner and a free copy of Simon’s book, Dancing on My Own provided. Advanced registration is required.

6 p.m.: Dancing on My Own: Book Talk and Signing with Author Simon Wu ‘17

Writer, art curator and alumnus Simon Wu ‘17 will discuss his new book, Dancing On My Own, in conversation with Monica Youn ‘93, Visiting Professor of Creative Writing; Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes Visiting Poet.  

Followed by a book signing and reception, with books available for purchase. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts, Labyrinth Books, the Center for Career Development, and the Department of Art & Archaeology.

About Dancing on my Own

In Robyn’s 2010 track Dancing on My Own, the Swedish pop-singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this way, she transforms her solitude into a more complex joy. Taking inspiration from Robyn’s seminal track, emerging art critic and curator Simon Wu dances through the institutions of art, capitalism, and identity in these expertly researched, beautifully rendered essays. In “A Model Childhood” he catalogs the decades’ worth of clutter in his mother’s suburban garage and its meaning for himself and his family. In “For Everyone,” Wu explores the complicated sensation of the Telfar bag (often referred to as “the Brooklyn Birkin”) and asks whether fashion can truly be revolutionary in a capitalist system—if something can truly be “for everyone” without undercutting someone else. Throughout, Wu centers the sticky vulnerability of living in a body in a world where history is mapped into every choice we make, every party drug we take, and every person we kiss.  Wu’s message is that to dance on your own is to move from critique into joy. To approach identity with the utmost sympathy for the kinds of belonging it might promise, and to look beyond it. For readers of Cathy Park Hong and Alexander Chee, Dancing on My Own is a deeply felt and ultimately triumphant anthem about the never-ending journey of discovering oneself, and introduces a brilliant new writer on the rise.

Simon Wu '17 is a curator and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. He has organized exhibitions and programs at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, MoMA, and David Zwirner, among other venues. In 2021 he was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and was featured in Cultured magazine's Young Curators series. He was a 2018 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and is currently in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale University. He has two brothers, Nick and Duke, and loves the ocean. You can find more information about Simon here: http://simonwu.info/

Monica Youn '93 is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing; Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes Visiting Poet at Princeton. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award and the PEN Open Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award, as well as being named one of the best poetry collections of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, among other awards. She is a member of the curatorial group The Racial Imaginary Institute. The daughter of Korean immigrants and a former lawyer, she was raised in Houston, Texas, and now lives in New York.