The Color of Sound with John Cotter & Shanna Compton

Join us for an evening with writers John Cotter and Shanna Compton as they read from their recent works and engage in a dynamic conversation about language, perception, and shifting terrains of the senses. In dialogue with the 2025 NEA Big Read selection Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, Cotter and Compton will discuss their own work’s relation to sensory loss, adaptation, and poetic expression. Through readings, discussion, a collage slide show, and conversation with the audience, the writers will delve into how writing can give voice to altered perception and how language, music, and art are tools for navigating sensory change. Presented in partnership by SPACE and Mechanics’ Hall with the NEA Big Read of Deaf Republic, this event invites explorations of how we listen, perceive, and communicate.

Please send ASL requests to info@space538.org. SPACE is wheelchair accessible. Books by both writers will be available for purchase through Print at the event.

John Cotter is the author of the novel Under the Small Lights, and the memoir Losing Music, which Oprah Daily calls, “as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it.” The Millions calls Losing Music, “a powerful addition to the memoir canon–hard-hitting, beautiful, profound.” And The Wall Street Journal says, “Evidence that Mr. Cotter’s ear is still keen for the melodies of language sings from every page.” 

John has written about hotel bars for The New York Times, camping in a homeless shelter for Guernica, and dinosaurs for Prairie Schooner. Further fiction, essays, and criticism, have appeared in New England Review, Epoch, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Georgia Review, Commonweal, and Joyland. He’s been a resident artist at SPACE gallery and the James Merrill House. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Shanna Compton is a poet, printmaker, and book designer in Blue Hill, ME. She is the author of five books of poems: Creature Sounds Fade (Black Lawrence Press), Midwinter Constellation (coauthor, Black Lawrence Press), Brink (Bloof Books), For Girls & Other Poems (Bloof Books), Down Spooky (Winnow Press). Her poems have appeared in publications such as the Nation, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and The Best American Poetry anthology series. As a visual artist, she works in linocut, woodcut, monotype, collage, and mixed media. An artist book called Deep Whoosh is forthcoming in 2025 from John Yau’s Black Square Editions, featuring her series of 50 closed-caption sound-effect collages.

This program is made possible as part of the NEA Big Read in partnership with Mechanic’s Hall, a program administered by Arts MidWest on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts.