Past Events

Archive 2005-2006

Friday, September 9

Ahdaf Soueif
Maps of Letters: A Conversation
4:00 PM ICC (Inter-Cultural Center)

Co-sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, the Marino Family International Writers' Workshop
Ahdaf Soueif, born in Cairo, Egypt, is one of the most widely read Arab fiction writers in English. Her most recent novel, Maps of Love, was short-listed for The Booker Prize in 1999. She will discuss the role of the writer in society as it relates to the emergence of the Anglo-Arab novel form.

Wednesday, September 28

John Kinsella & Juliana Spahr
Poetic (Dis)location
Seminar: 5:30 PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00 PM ICC Auditorium

Australian poet and editor, John Kinsella, is the author of more than thirty books, including The New Arcadia, and Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poetry. Juliana Spahr's poetry, according to the New York Times, "reach[es] after the whole shebang." Her collections of poems include This Connection of Everyone with Lungs and Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You.

Tuesday, October 18

Amiri Baraka & Rod Smith
Art and Politics: An Overview
Seminar: 5:30 PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00 PM ICC Auditorium

Poet, essayist, dramatist, political activist Amiri Baraka is widely recognized as the central figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and has been a tireless innovator and instigator ever since. Recent additions to his extensive bibliography include Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems and The Essence of Reparations. Poet and publisher Rod Smith's most recent books include Music or Honesty and Poèmes de l'araignée. Peter Gizzi has written that Smith is "submodernism's first genius."

Tuesday, November 15

Kenneth Goldsmith & Darren Wershler-Henry
Conceptual Poetics and Uncreative Writing
Seminar: 5:30 PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00 PM ICC Auditorium

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called by Publisher's Weekly some of the most "exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry." Goldsmith is the author of eight books of poetry and founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb. Darren Wershler-Henry is the author of two books of poetry, NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs, and the tapeworm foundry, which was short-listed for the Trillium Prize. His most recent book is The Iron Whim: An Archaeology of Typewriting.

Tuesday, January 31

Susan Stewart
Poetry and the Feeling of a Thought
Seminar: 5:30 PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00 PM ICC Auditorium

Widely acclaimed poet and critic Susan Stewart is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Forest and Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. Her prose works include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, winner of the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism and the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism.

Tuesday, February 28

Christian Bök & Alice Notley
Musical and Other Influences
Seminar: 5:30 PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00 PM ICC Auditorium

Christian Bök is the author of the bestselling Eunoia and Crystallography. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Earth: Final Conflict and Amazon, and has earned accolades for his sound poetry performances and conceptual artworks. Alice Notley is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry. Her poetic autobiography Mysteries of Small Houses was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and her long poem Disobedience won the Griffin International Prize in 2002.

Tuesday, March 21

Diran Adebayo
Reading from His Fiction
7:00 PM Philodemic Room, Healy Hall
British Council (USA) Writer in Residence

The British Council USA's UK Writer-in-Residence program is an ongoing literature initiative at major American universities. Diran Adebayo's magical ride onto the literary A-list began with the release of his first novel, Some Kind of Black, winner of the prestigious Betty Trask Award. His second novel, My Once Upon a Time, moved the Daily Telegraph to declare: "This is a book that sings...by turns rhapsodic, exhilerating and poignant." Adebayo's residency is co-sponsored by the Program in African-American Studies and the Humanities Initiative.

Tuesday, March 28

Lee Ann Brown & Abigail Child
Moving the Image
Seminar: 5:30 PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00 PM ICC Auditorium

In addition to many magazine and anthology publications, Lee Ann Brown is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, The Sleep That Changed Everything and Polyverse. Brown is currently collaborating with her husband Tony Torn on SOP DOLL! A Jack Tale Noh Play. Abigail Child pushes the envelope of sound-image relations with sensitivity, smarts, and ephemeral beauty. Her latest film, The Future is Behind You, premiered at the New York Film Festival last October.

Tuesday, May 2

Adrienne Rich
Lannan Distinguished Reader 2005-2006
Poetry of a Difficult World
Poetry Reading: 8:00 PM, ICC Auditorium

"All of her life she has been in love with the hope of telling the utter truth," writes W. S. Merwin of Adrienne Rich. The author of more than fifteen volumes of poetry as well as several collections of non-fiction prose, Rich has received a Lannan Lifetime Achievement award, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other honors.