Vicki Valosik: SWIMMING PRETTY (with Margaret Guroff)

The Ivy Bookshop is pleased to present an evening of discussion around women in sports history, featuring Vicki Valosik and her engaging, thorough new history of women in synchronized swimming! Swimming Pretty explores the tensions between beauty and strength, aesthetics and athleticism have both impeded and propelled the careers of female swimmers–none more so than synchronized swimmers. It’s on our Swimming display at the Ivy and we’ve been big fans since before publication! Meg Guroff, author of The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life, will join Valosik in conversation.

Vicki Valosik, whose writing has appeared in publications such as the Atlantic, Smithsonian magazine, and Slate, is an editorial director and teaches writing at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She is also a masters synchronized swimmer and competes on a team based in Washington DC. Vicki earned her MA in Nonfiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Margaret Guroff, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a former editor of Baltimore magazine, is an executive editor at AARP The Magazine. She is also the editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick, an online annotation of Herman Melville’s classic novel. Her cultural history book, The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life, was published in 2016 by the University of Texas Press. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.