Inflections of Belief
Writer Ayana Mathis discusses the religious inflections in the fiction she reads, writes, and critiques.
Writer Ayana Mathis was raised in a Black evangelical church; her young life was circumscribed by the mores, doctrine, and rituals of faith in a God of contradictions: loving and generous on one hand, inscrutable and wrathful on the other. Mathis left the church long ago, but its influence has never fully dissipated: Religious practice opened into an inclination toward the mechanisms and mysteries of belief and a deep interest in the ways in Western morality, aesthetics, and culture—literature in particular—grapple with religious impulse and logic. Even as mainstream culture moves away from religious affiliation, contemporary literature in the United States continues to engage, implicitly and explicitly, with iterations of religious ideas not dissimilar from those of the tradition in which she was raised. In this talk—more exploration than analysis—Mathis discusses the religious inflections, for better and for worse, in the fiction she reads, writes, and critiques.
Meet the speaker
Ayana Mathis is on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College, CUNY. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she became the first African American woman to become an assistant professor in that program. Her most recent novel, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023…
Meet the speaker
Ayana Mathis received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she subsequently became the first African American woman to hold the position of Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing. She has taught in the MFA writing programs at Columbia University and Rutgers University at Newark. Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie…
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