Episode 21: Sony Ton-Aimé - “Facilitating Grace”

In this ep we get into “arts administration”: how to do it well, why maybe it should be called something else, and what small presses can offer literary programs of all sizes. We talk with one of the best in the field, literary organizer Sony Ton-Aimé, currently executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures and formerly director of literary arts at the Chautauqua Institution. Sony talks about how programs like these reach and activate readers and shares his insight on how to build community practices and empowering conversations between readers and writers. How do you cultivate agency in your audience? How do you create meaningful events? What does it mean to be a good host? How can organizational and curatorial work help create openness, grace, and a readiness to learn and be challenged? We try to answer it all and see what small presses can teach us.

A couple books get mentioned along the way, including Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum and Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us. And we highly recommend checking out some of Sony’s recent work, for example “Awe Studies: Resisting Awe” and “A Killing Two Hundred Years in the Making: On Haiti and the Narrative of Empire.”