2018-2019 Events – Poetry and Poetics at Northwestern

2018-2019 Events:

On Wednesday, April 3rd, 5:00-6:30pm in University Hall 201, we will host a reading and conversation featuring the award-winning poets José Olivarez (author of Citizen Illegal) and Emily Jungmin Yoon (author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species).

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he is co-editing the forthcoming anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods and a recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Poets House, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, & the Conversation Literary Festival. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual “Author and Artist in Justice Award” from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a “Debut Poet of 2018” by Poets & Writers. He lives in New York City.

Emily Jungmin Yoon was born in Busan, Republic of Korea. She is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), and a full-length collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, published by Ecco in 2018. Yoon earned her MFA in creative writing at New York University, where she served as an award editor for the Washington Square Review and received a Starworks Fellowship. Her poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry magazine, Columbia Journal Online, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is the poetry editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is pursuing a PhD in Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

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Please Join Us on Tuesday, January 29th, 2019 at 7pm @ The Poetry Foundation for a celebration with the winners of the 2018 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize!

Thiahera Nurse and Andrew E. Colarusso will read from their newly released chapbooks: Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone and Creance; Or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite, with musical accompaniment by Tatsu Aoki’s Reduction Ensemble.

The event is free and open to the public, and the authors will be available to sign copies of the chapbooks after the reading.

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Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently an assistant professor of literary arts at Brown University. is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Broome Street Review, an independently published literary journal dedicated to art and culture at the vanguard. His debut novel, The Sovereign, is available from Dalkey Archive Press and his writing has been published or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Callaloo Art, FENCE, and 3:AM Magazine, among others.

Thiahera Nurse is from Hollis, Queens by way of Trinidad and Tobago. She received her MFA in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, Callaloo, The Offing, and in the forthcoming edition of The BreakBeat Poets Anthology. She has received support from Callaloo, Tin House, and The Pink Door Retreat. She is a 2018 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. She writes for the black girls (the living and the dead). She is an expert in thinking aloud.

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FUTURES OF POETICS: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin workshop!

Please join Poetry & Poetics Colloquium and the Black Poetics Collective for a special FUTURES OF POETICS event discussing Terrance Hayes’ recent collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (currently a finalist for the National Book Award).

We will be meeting at 5pm on Monday, November 12th in the Kaplan Humanities Institute Seminar Room (Kresge Hall #2-350)

Additionally, after the book discussion we will hold a brief writing workshop and reception. Refreshments will be provided.

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Spaces of Exchange: A Symposium on Mandorla, a half-day conference on Friday, October 12, 2018.

The occasion is our digital reissue of the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas (1991-2013) which we’ll make available on Open Door Archive in the coming weeks. Mandorla, published from 1991 to 2013 in Mexico City (followed by Buffalo, New York, and Bloomington, Illinois) was a bilingual magazine that connected some of the most innovative U.S.-Latina/o writing of the 1990s and 2000s to writing and art from Latin America, especially Mexico and Cuba.

1PM (Hagstrum Room)

Mandorla’s Legacies: Talks by Edgar Garcia (U Chicago), Rachel Galvin (U Chicago), Steve Halle (ISU Publications Unit), and Emily Maguire (Northwestern)

3PM (Hagstrum Room)A Keynote Conversation: Mandorla founding editors Roberto Tejada (U of Houston) and Kristin Dykstra (St. Michaels) in conversation with John Alba Cutler and Harris Feinsod.

5PM (Annie May Swift Hall Auditorium)

A Poetry Reading with Daniel Borzutzky (UIC), Franscisco Aragón (Notre Dame), Mónica de la Torre (Brown U), Urayoán Noel (NYU), Roberto Tejada and Kristin Dykstra

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2017-2018 Events:

A Forum on The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures, by Harris Feinsod
Thursday, January 18th, 5pm in Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201)

Remarks by:
Tom McEnaney, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California Berkeley
Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University
José Delpino, PhD Candidate in Spanish and Portuguese, Northwestern University
Harris Feinsod, Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Comparative Modernisms Workshop, and the American Cultures Colloquium

Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize Release Reading featuring Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Matthew Shenoda, and Trio Alma Jarocha de Chicago

Thursday, January 11th, 7pm at the Poetry Foundation (61 W Superior St, Chicago, IL 60654), doors open at 6:30pm.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s chapbook Dulce won this year’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize and was recently published by Northwestern University Press. On January 11th Marcelo will be reading alongside acclaimed poet and Columbia College professor Matthew Shenoda, and with music from the Trio Alma Jarocha de Chicago.

The event is free and open to the public, and the author will be available to sign copies of Dulce after the reading.

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Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. prize and will be published by BOA editions in 2018. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins.

He was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and immigrated at the age of five with his family to the California central valley. As an AB540 student, he earned his B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award. Through a literary partnership with Amazon Publishing he has helped to establish The Undocupoet Fellowship which provides funding to help curb the cost of submissions to journals and contests.

He is the translator of the Argentinian modernist poet, Jacobo Fijman and is currently at work translating the poems of the contemporary Mexican Peruvian poet Yaxkin Melchy. He co-translated the work of the Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe with C.D. Wright before her untimely passing.

His work has been adopted to Opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya and has appeared in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son.

Bettina Judd and Safiya Sinclair: “On Black Feminist Poetics”

Thursday, October 5th, 2017,
12:30-2:30pm, Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201)

This event will feature poetry readings by two acclaimed contemporary poets, Bettina Judd and Safiya Sinclair, who will read from their debut collections. This reading will be followed by a conversation on the topics of Black feminist poetics, scientific racism, and the archive. Bettina Judd is the author of Patient (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), which won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and a Whiting Writers’ Award. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This event is co-presented with the Black Poetics Collective and co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; the Center for the Writing Arts; the Department of African American Studies, the Black Graduate Student Association; the Department of Performance Studies; and the Program in Critical Theory.