Chris Vinsonhaler “Grendel’s Mama Comes Callin’!”

A Retelling of Beowulf With More Sweet Tea (Based on the poem they made you read in 10th grade).

Project website: Beowulf.Live

Teller Bio: Chris Vinsonhaler is a translator, storyteller, and medievalist whose work bridges scholarship and live performance. A retired Professor of English at The City University of New York, she brings Beowulf to life as both text and event, recovering the poem’s riddling structure, irony, and moral complexity through translation, commentary, and performance. Her approach treats the poem not as a relic of the past but as a living narrative shaped by voice, repetition, and ethical pressure.

Vinsonhaler’s performance-based Beowulf projects have received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a CUNY Faculty Development Grant, and her work has been presented nationally and internationally at universities, conferences, and festivals. Beowulf: An Epic Enigma is the culmination of decades of scholarship, memorization, and live performance, offering a groundbreaking translation that challenges heroic nostalgia and reveals the poem’s unsettling moral design.