A Conversation with Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (ONLINE EVENT)
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Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan met as doctoral students in UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric Department. Their friendship endured over the years but suddenly changed course during the pandemic. The friends became writing partners, collaborating on stories as they lived through the pandemic. The collaboration culminated in the publication of their 2025 memoir The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once. Kiese Laymon calls the book “necessary and devastating…It is real. It is true. It is fiction. And it is absolutely as honest a book as I’ve ever read.”
In conversation with Rhetoric Professor Marianne Constable, Bornfree and Srinivasan discuss their collaboration and writing process, and the strange and wonderful story of how this memoir came to be.
Join us!
This event is being livestreamed on YouTube and will be posted on our website later.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English at Rice University. A scholar of Asian American and South Asian Anglophone literature, she is the author The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once (Aleph), Overdetermined (Columbia UP), and What is We? (Agenda).
Chi Rainer Bornfree
Chi Rainer Bornfree is a writer and organizer who has taught at Bard, Princeton, and NY state prisons. They are also the co-founder of the Activist Graduate School and co-creator of AI for the People, an award-winning, multidisciplinary vision of human-AI symbiosis.
Marianne Constable
Marianne Constable is Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford University Press, 2014), among other works in law and humanities.