THURSDAY OCTOBER 5

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

James Scully was born in 1937 in New Haven, CT. Winner of the 1967 Lamont Award, he was also the recipient of a 1973 Guggenheim Fellowship. He spent 19733-1974 in Santiago de Chile, during the early stage of the Pinochet regime, which he documented in his poetry book, Santiago Poems. Author of plays as well as poetry, his works include: Apollo Helmet and Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice. He is translator of Quechua Peoples Poetry.
                               
Born in Toronto, Canadian writer Lisa Robertson lived in Vancouver for twenty-three years, where she was a participant in the continuing utopian experiment called The Kootenay School of Writing. She now lives in France. Her books of poetry include XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic, The Weather , and Rousseau’s Boat. She recently published Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, a linked series of prose essays on cities, architecture and ornament, and a book of poems, The Men: A Lyric Book. This fall she is Holloway poet in residence at UC Berkeley.

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 was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of twelve books of poetry.  Her selected poems, I Love Artists, was published by the University of California Press in 2006. A collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, Concordance, recently appeared from the Rutgers Center for Innovative Paper and Print and in a trade edition from Kelsey Street Press. She lives in rural New Mexico and in New York City.
 
Brenda Hillman has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), all from Wesleyan University Press. She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003).

Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Hillman serves on the faculty of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs, and she is also a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is married to poet Robert Hass.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 16

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

Caroline Bergvall is a poet and performance artist based in London, England. Books include: Goan Atom (Krupskaya, 2001) and Eclat (Sound&Language, 1996). Her most recent collection of poetic and performance pieces, FIG (Goan Atom 2) appeared in 2005. Her CD of readings and audiotexts, Via: poems 1994-2004 (Rockdrill 8) is available through Carcanet. As an artist, she has developed text performances as well as collaborative pieces with sound artists, both in Europe and in North America, including the installation Little Sugar for TEXT Festival (Bury, 2005) and Say: “Parsley” at the Liverpool Biennial (2004). Her critical work is largely concerned with emerging forms of writing, plurilingual poetry and mixed media writing practices. She is co-Chair of the MFA Writing Faculty, Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College (NY) and Research Fellow at Dartington College of Arts (Devon).

Book artist, visual poet and critic, Johanna Drucker, is currently the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Her most recent books include Damaged Spring (Druckwerk 2003), From Now (Cuneiform Press 2005) and Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press 2005).

Author/editor of nearly forty books, Jerome McGann is John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia.  His most recent work includes The Scholar's Art: Literature and Scholarship in an Administered World (U of Chicago P, 2006) and The Point is to Change It: Literature in the Continuing Present (forthcoming 2007, U of Alabama P).

Penn Szittya is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Georgetown University and is the author of The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton UP) and the editor of the Pardoner’s Tale volume for the Chaucer Variorum. He has published on medieval literatures in Old French, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Middle English, and Latin, in PMLA. Speculum, Medieval Studies, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, and elsewhere.

FEBRUARY 13-14

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Lannan Distinguished Reader 2007
Writers, Masses, Multitudes: A Lannan Symposium

Reading from his recent work
8:00PM . Tuesday, February 13 . ICC Aud.

Symposium with Ngugi on the critical legacies of decolonization
1:15PM . Wednesday, February 14 . ICC Aud.

Lacay Lecture Series 2006-2007
"The Word Made Flesh: Literature and the Aesthetics of Resistance"
5:00PM . Wednesday February 14 . ICC Auditorium

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's early work was written in English under the name of James Ngugi. Novels such as The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977) established his reputation as the foremost writer in post-Independence Kenya. In the 1970s, he abandoned English for Gikuyu and Swahili, writing his critical apologia on this subject in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). Subsequent of the performance of his play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), he was imprisoned without charge by the Kenyan authorities in a maximum security prison at the end of 1977. The period of his incarceration produced two notable works: the Gikuyu novel Caitaani Mutharabaini, published in translation as Devil on the Cross (1987), and his memoirs, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981). The novel Murogi wa Kagogo was recently published in English as Wizard of the Crow (2006), from a translation by the author. Having lived and taught for many years in the United States at universities such as Yale and NYU, Ngugi is currently Director of the Center for Writing and Translation, and Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at the University of California, Irvine.

Participants in the two-day symposium "Writers, Masses, Multitudes" include Ngugi, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ganesh Devy, and DaKxin Bajarange Chhara. The program and schedule for the symposium can be found here.

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.

Tuesday 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.