Join us for a powerful talk by acclaimed writer John Cotter, who will share insights from his award-winning memoir Losing Music: A Memoir of Art, Pain, and Transformation (Milkweed, 2023). Winner of the 2024 Colorado Book Award, Cotter’s work explores the ways art can guide us through profound personal challenges and help us reimagine the meaning of resilience.
📅 Thursday, November 6 | Noon–1 pm
📍 Arapahoe Community College Main Gallery
🎟 Free & open to all students and the public
Hosted by the Art & Design Center in collaboration with the ACC Library, and funded by the City of Littleton Arts & Culture and Behavioral Health Grants.
About the Speaker
John Cotter is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Losing Music: A Memoir of Art, Pain, and Transformation (Milkweed, 2023), winner of the Colorado Book Award in 2024. He has written for The New York Times, Commonweal, Bookforum, Raritan, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. His novella Under the Small Lights is available from Miami University Press. Cotter has been a resident artist at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, and SPACE gallery in Portland, Maine. He currently teaches at Emerson College in Boston.
John Cotter lost most of his hearing and balance as a young man. Beset by vertigo and a roaring in his head, he gave up the job he loved; music and voices grew fainter. Writing the memoir Losing Music, building a piece of art from scratch, one paragraph per day, he was able to haul himself back to life, each page another rung. In a society that measures worth in dollars and affords dignity only to some, art supplies different measures, new devices for weighing truth, new ways of understanding what’s real. Art is something to lean against. Art is an escape hatch.
Learn more about John Cotter’s work: https://johncotter.net/