January 18, 2012, Wednesday - Christine Stark & Olga Trujillo Reading at The Loft

Time: 7:00pm

Location: The Loft, Performance Hall, 1011 Washington Avenue South

Christine Stark’s Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation follows a biracial girl named Little Miss So And So, from age 4 into adulthood. Told in a series of prose poems, Nickels' lyrical and inventive language conveys the dissociative states born of a world formed by persistent and brutal incest and homophobia. The dissociative states enable the child's survival and, ultimately, the adult's healing. The content is heartbreaking and triumphant.

The Sum of My Parts is the story of Olga Trujillo, an attorney who was diagnosed at the age of 31 with dissociative identity disorder, a condition (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) that is characterized by a severe form of dissociation, a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. In her powerful memoir of survival and self-reclamation, Trujillo recounts a childhood filled with the horrors of rape, abuse, and incest; a situation so traumatic that as a very young child she learned to create “parts” to help her deal with and then forget the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, brothers, and others. From the outside she seemed like an average child, though she was often the object of concern to caring adults who seemed to feel that all was not right at home. However, they could not prove the abuse was happening, and young Olga’s brain sheltered her from the memory of it, until the time finally came when the truth could no longer be contained. By then in her thirties, Olga Trujillo began the devastating process of remembering the truth about her childhood.

Christine Stark is an award-winning writer of American Indian and European ancestry whose work has been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including University of Pennsylvania Law Review; The Florida Review; Feminist Studies; Poetry Motel; Hawk and Handsaw: the Journal of Creative Sustainability; Birthed From Scorched Hearts; Poetry Midwest; Our Choices, Our Lives; and Primavera. She is a co-editor of an international anthology entitled Not for Sale and the author of the poem “Momma’s Song” which is part of a double CD/manga recorded by Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Ensemble. She has been on National Public Radio’s Justice Talking, she is a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2010 Loft Mentorship winner in creative non-fiction. Christine teaches writing at Metropolitan State University and lives in Minneapolis with her partner, April.

Olga Trujillo is an attorney, who after 12 years with the United States Department of Justice, left to work with communities on trauma, domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault as well as immigration and human trafficking issues.

As a consultant she has worked with most national organizations addressing the issues of violence against women and children and, in particular, the co-occurrence of domestic violence and child abuse. Olga has also appeared in several videos including Cut it Out, a training video on domestic violence for hair stylists, and A Survivor’s Story, a training video based on her personal experience and live presentations. 

Olga is a recipient of the Bud Cramer Leadership Award given by the National Children’s Alliance for her work to help professionals around the country better understand the impact of violence on children. Olga is also a recipient of a Sunshine Lady Foundation Peace Awards for her work for battered women and their children. Latina magazine featured Olga in its August 2006 issue for her survival and her work on these issues. Olga lives on a small farm in Wisconsin with her partner and their dogs and cats.

This reading is free and open to the public.