Thursday April 3
7:00 at Blue Hill Public Library
5 Parker Point Road
Blue Hill, Maine 04614
co-sponsored by Blue Hill Books & Blue Hill Public Library
Whether for entertainment, under the guise of medicine, or to propel consumerism, heinous acts are perpetrated daily on women’s bodies. In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, award-winning journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore catalogs the global toll of capitalism on our physical autonomy. Weaving together unflinching research and surprising humor, these essays range from investigative–probing the Cambodian garment industry, the history of menstrual products, or the gender biases of patent law–to uncomfortably intimate. Informed by her own navigation of several autoimmune diagnoses, Moore examines what it takes to seek care and community in the increasingly complicated, problematic, and disinterested US healthcare system.
A Lambda Literary Award finalist and a Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Award shortlist title, Body Horror is “sharp, shocking, and darkly funny. . . . Brainy and historically informed, this collection is less a rallying cry or a bitter diatribe than a series of irreverent and ruthlessly accurate jabs at a culture that is slowly devouring us” ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). Featuring an updated introduction and new essays, as well as illustrations by Xander Marro, this new edition of Body Horror is a fascinating, insightful portrait of the gore that encapsulates contemporary American politics.
Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, SD, and lives in the Catskills with two ineffective feline personal assistants, Captain America and Mitakuye “Taku” Oyasin Moore-America. She is a cultural critic, journalist, and humorist and works in a range of text, visual, and audio formats.
Her 2021 title, Gentrifier: A Memoir, was an NPR Best Book. In 2019, her book on comics creator Julie Doucet, Sweet Little Cunt, won a Will Eisner Comics Industry Award. Her book Body Horror was nominated for a 2017 Lambda Literary Award and a Chicago Review of Books Award, was listed as a 100 Best Book Of All Time on the Political Economy by BookAuthority and named Best Book by the Chicago Public Library. The comics journalism collection Threadbare made the 2016 Tits & Sass list “Best Investigative Reporting on Sex Work.” Cambodian Grrrl received a 2012 Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism. Unmarketable was named Best Book of 2007 by Mother Jones.
Moore has freelanced for The Guardian, Anarchist Review of Books, Salon, Paris Review, The Baffler, Truthout, The Believer, The Nation, and many others. Her essays “Reimagining the National Border Patrol Museum (and Gift Shop)” and “17 Theses on the Edge” received honorable mentions in Best American Non-Required Reading (2008 and 2010, respectively). “Three Days in Detroit,” an essay in The Baffler, was long-listed for Best American Essays 2018. Her essay “I was given a house” in The Guardian was the runner-up for an ASJA Award in the category of Social Change and was short-listed for a Nonprofit News Award for Breaking Barriers.
Moore is the former editor and co-publisher of award-winning Punk Planet, the founding editor of the Best American Comics, and the former editor in chief of the Chicago Reader. She has exhibited work in the Whitney Biennial in New York; in Leipzig, Phnom Penh, Berlin, Tbilisi, Lisbon, and Vienna; and in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Moore has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts Award, a UN Press Fellowship, a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts, a Ragdale Fellowship, two Fulbright Scholarships, and a Yaddo residency. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a visiting artist at ArtCenter, and was the 2019 Mackey Chair at Beloit College. She currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts.
Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, was released in an expanded second edition by Feminist Press in Spring 2023. My Inevitable Murder, the “true-ish crime” podcast in which she investigates her own murder in advance, was shortlisted for two Women’s International Podcast Awards and a Press Gazette Future of Media Award. The second season of My Inevitable Murder is supported by a New York State Council for the Arts Support for Artists grant and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Moore is the 2025 Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence at Colby College.