During the Modernist Studies Association conference, which had its annual meeting in Boston from October 9-12, 2025, Laura Hartmann-Villalta and writer Jamie Hood explored her newly published memoir, Trauma Plot. The conversation was sponsored by the Intersectional Queer & Feminist Praxis Special Interest Group.

Trauma Plot was a 2025 highly anticipated book by both Vogue and Vulture pre-publication and earned a starred review from Kirkus. By turns literary and genre-defying, the memoir is deeply inspired by modernist prose aesthetics. A February 18 review in The Rumpus by Erin Vachon described Hood’s prose: “She writes like Woolf, if Woolf was your barhopping friend from grad school, acerbic and sensitive in equal measure.”