Past Events

Archive 2006-2007

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5

James Scully & Lisa Robertson
Social Practice
Seminar: 5:30PM 462 ICC . Reading: 8:00PM ICC Aud.

James Scully's books include Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice and Raging Beauty: Selected Poems. He is co-translator of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Quechua People's Poetry, among other titles. For many years, Lisa Robertson was a participant in the Kootenay School of Writing, an experimental utopian community based in Vancouver. She is author of Debbie: An Epic, Rousseau's Boat, and The Men: A Lyric Book.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19

Brenda Hillman & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Gender on the Lyric Edge
Seminar: 5:30PM 462 ICC . Reading: 8:00PM ICC Aud.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's mixed-media collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, Concordance , has been published by the Rutgers Center for Innovative Paper and Print. Her selected poems, I Love Artists , appeared in 2006. Among Brenda Hillman's recent books are Pieces of Air in the Epic and an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry. She is active in the non-violent Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16

Jerome McGann, Joanna Drucker, Penn Szittya, Caroline Bergvall
The Poetic Book: Medieval, Modern, Postmodern
Lecture & Seminar: 4:00PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00PM ICC.

At this symposium devoted to illuminated manuscripts and artists' books, keynote-speaker Jerome McGann will be joined by Penn Szittya, Caroline Bergvall, and Joanna Drucker. They will discuss issues of production and reception in the “poetic” book—an artifice of word, image, and material—as it appears in culture at different historical moments. Caroline Bergvall and Joanna Drucker will read and perform their poetry later that evening.

FEBRUARY, 12-13

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Lannan Distinguished Reader 2007
The Poetic Book: Medieval, Modern, Postmodern
Writers, Masses, Multitudes

“Writers, Masses, Multitudes” explores connections between anti-colonial liberation movements and the contemporary neo-liberal world order. Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, American writer Kim Stanley Robinson, Indian writers and social activists Ganesh Devy and DaKxin Bajrange Chhara, and others, will gather for readings, film screenings, and a roundtable discussion over a two-day period. Topics include issues of civil society, human rights, race and gender equality, and globalization. Organized in concert with the Program in Justice and Peace at Georgetown University .

THURSDAY, MARCH 15

Yusef Komunyakaa
Vernaculars
Seminar: 5:30PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00PM ICC Aud.

Yusef Komunyakaa's collections of poetry include Taboo, Talking Dirty to the Gods ; Thieves of Paradise ; and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 , winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is co-translator of The Insomnia of Fir e by Nguyen Quang Thieu . For his service in Vietnam , where he worked as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross, he was awarded the Bronze Star. He is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

THURSDAY, APRIL 10

Russell Banks and Edwidge Danticat
Memory of Affliction
Seminar: 5:30PM 462 ICC • Reading: 8:00PM ICC Aud.

Russell Banks is author of a dozen novels and collections of short stories. Among others, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter have been made into feature-length films. Currently the New York State Author (2004-2006), he is also President of the International Parliament of Writers and of the North American Network of Cities of Asylum. Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones is now in its tenth printing. She has edited The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States , and is author of The Dew Breaker and Breath, Eyes, Memory , a novel published when she was 24.