2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize

January 26, 2016

Reading

For a full video of the performance, please click here: part 01 part 02.

Join us for an evening of words and music, as we celebrate the third Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. Renowned author Chris Abani will join Nicole Sealey, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Prize. The evening will include readings from Professor Abani’s diverse and extensive body of work, Sealey’s winning chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, and live performances by Tatsu Aoki, a Chicago-based bassist and Shamisen Lute player. Copies of Lin’s chapbook, just released from Northwestern University Press, will be available for sale.

Chris Abani is an acclaimed author. His most recent novel is The Secret History of Las Vegas. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. Born in Nigeria, he is currently a Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow as well as the recipient of a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her other honors include the 2014 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a 2013 Daniel Varoujan Award and the 2012 Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Born in Japan into an artisan family, Tatsu Aoki is a prolific artist, composer, musician, educator and a consummate bassist and Shamisen Lute player. Based in Chicago, Aoki works in a wide range of musical genres, ranging from traditional Japanese music, jazz, experimental and creative music and is a leading advocate for the Asian American community, as well a filmmaker, and an educator. Aoki was named one of 2001’s “Chicagoans of the year” by Chicago Tribune for his music. Aoki’s suite ROOTED: Origins of Now, a four-movement suite for big band, premiered in 2001 at Ping Tom Memorial Park, and was performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival and at MCA Stage as part of Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival. Additional notable releases include Basser Live (1999) and Basser Live II (2005), recorded live at MCA Stage; The MIYUMI Project (2000), Symphony of Two Cities (2002), and Posture of Reality with Wu Man (2003). The Asian American Institute awarded Aoki the Milestone Award in 2007 for his contribution to Chicago-area arts. In 2010, he received the Japan America Society of Chicago’s Cultural Achievement Award and the “Living in our Culture” award this year by the Japanese American Service Committee.

Rodrigo Garcia Lopes

November 19, 2015

Discussion

The Poetry and Poetics, in conjunction with the Colloquium “Words in Transit,” invites you to join Brazilian artist Rodrigo Garcia Lopes. He will be part of a round table on translation on November 19th, 12-2pm, at Hagstrum Room (University Hall, 201). Northwestern Professors Reginald Gibbons and Andrew Leong will be his respondents and facilitators of the conversation. A light lunch will be served.

Rodrigo Garcia Lopes is a poet, translator, and composer from Brazil. He has an M.A. from ASU (USA) and a Ph.D. in English from UFSC (Brazil). He has published six collections of poetry, translations of Whitman, Rimbaud, Plath, and Riding. Last year he released the historical detective novel The Troubadour. His poems have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Best 100 Brazilian Poems of the Twentieth Century. As a composer, he recently released the CD Songs from Reality Studio. Site: http://www.rgarcialopes.wix.com/site

Reginald Betts & Patricia Smith

November 11, 2015

Workshop

Join us for a lunchtime poetics workshop with poets Reginald Betts and Patricia Smith. They will be both discussing and reading their works at 12pm, November 11 at University Hall 201. A light lunch will be served.

Reginald Betts is author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (2009) and the poetry collection Shahid Reads his own Palm (2010), and Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015). He is a 2010 Soros Justice Fellow and 2011 Radcliffe Fellow.

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of six books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won a Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection. Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island and an instructor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

Matthew Shenoda

October 27, 2015

Reading

“Damming the Nile: A Poet’s Ecology”

Join us for a reading with the 2006 American Book Award winner Matthew Shenoda at 5:15pm, October 27 in Harris Hall 108.

Matthew Shenoda is a writer and professor whose poems and essays have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies.He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the Lannan Foundation among others. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Victor Hernández Cruz

April 24, 2015

Reading

Join us for the keynote reading by distinguished Puerto Rican poet Victor Hernández Cruz in conjunction with Poetry and Poetics at Northwestern’s Radical Poetics: Archives, Forms, Social Movements Symposium.

Cruz will read from his works at 5:00pm, April 24th in Harris Hall 108, with a light reception to follow.

Victor Hernández Cruz was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico and moved to New York City with his family when he was five years old. He started writing poetry early and at seventeen self-published his first book, Papo Got His Gun! And Other Poems, on a mimeograph machine. Cruz took part in the Nuyorican and Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Victor Hernandez Cruz was one of the founders of the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the recognition of multicultural writers. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1981, Life magazine named him one of America’s greatest poets.

More than a dozen collections of Cruz’s poems—among them Snaps (1969); By Lingual Wholes (1982); Red Beans (1991); Rhythm, Content, and Flavor: New and Selected Poems (1989); and The Mountain in the Sea (2006)—have been published by traditional publishing houses.

Craig Santos Perez

March 5, 2015

Presentation

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium is thrilled to announce that Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez will be joining us for talk entitled “Radical Pacific Islander Poetry from the 1960s and Beyond.” Join us for this event on Thursday, March 5th, 12:30-2:00pm in Crowe Hall 1-135. Lunch will be served.

Perez’s presentation will introduce attendees to the history, politics and cultures of Pacific Islander poetry that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, a fervent period of decolonization, sovereignty, and cultural revitalization movements. We will dive into the Pacific archives to explore the radical poets, educators, and publication projects (including zines, anthologies, and posters) from Melanesia and Polynesia. Furthermore, we will explore the legacy of this first wave of contemporary Pacific literature by highlighting decolonial poetic projects that emerged in Hawaiʻi and Guam in the 1980s and 1990s. Lastly, we will consider how new media has shaped 21st century decolonial Pacific poetry and poetics in response to climate change, militarization, colonialism, and tourism.

Christopher Nealon

January 29, 2015

Discussion

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium is proud to present a discussion led by scholar and poet Chris Nealon. Professor Nealon’s paper will be pre-circulated (see below) and the discussion will be held Thursday, January 29th, at 5:30pm in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201). Light refreshments will be served.

Professor Nealon’s paper, “Poetry and the Price of Value,” will draw on two poems from a wide historical range—Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524) and Jasper Bernes’s We Are Nothing and So Can You (2012)—to trace the long poetic history of thinking about materiality through the prosimetrum form. Nealon’s work will use the large historical distance between his examples both to identify some enduring continuities and to reflect on what it might mean for scholars of poetry to do more sustainedly cross-period work.

Christopher Nealon, teaches American literature, the history and theory of poetry, and the history of sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001), and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as three books of poems, The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004) Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He is currently at work on a book about the limits of academic anti-humanism.

Drinking Gourd Chapbook Release

January 13, 2014

Poetry Reading and Performance

Join us for an evening of words and music, as we celebrate the third Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. Renowned author Chris Abani will join Willie Lin, winner of the third annual Drinking Gourd Prize. The evening will include readings from Professor Abani’s diverse and extensive body of work, Lin’s winning chapbook, Instructions for Folding, and live performances by Tatsu Aoki, a Chicago-based bassist and Shamisen Lute player. Copies of Lin’s chapbook, just released from Northwestern University Press, will be available for sale.

Chris Abani is an acclaimed author. His most recent novel is The Secret History of Las Vegas. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. Born in Nigeria, he is currently a Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Willie Lin is the author of Instructions for Folding. Her poems have also appeared in Bone Bouquet, the Cincinnati Review, Washington Square Review, and other journals. She lives and works in Chicago.

Born in Japan into an artisan family, Tatsu Aoki is a prolific artist, composer, musician, educator and a consummate bassist and Shamisen Lute player. Based in Chicago, Aoki works in a wide range of musical genres, ranging from traditional Japanese music, jazz, experimental and creative music and is a leading advocate for the Asian American community, as well a filmmaker, and an educator. Aoki was named one of 2001’s “Chicagoans of the year” by Chicago Tribune for his music. Aoki’s suite ROOTED: Origins of Now, a four-movement suite for big band, premiered in 2001 at Ping Tom Memorial Park, and was performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival and at MCA Stage as part of Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival. Additional notable releases include Basser Live (1999) and Basser Live II (2005), recorded live at MCA Stage; The MIYUMI Project (2000), Symphony of Two Cities (2002), and Posture of Reality with Wu Man (2003). The Asian American Institute awarded Aoki the Milestone Award in 2007 for his contribution to Chicago-area arts. In 2010, he received the Japan America Society of Chicago’s Cultural Achievement Award and the “Living in our Culture” award this year by the Japanese American Service Committee.

Palabra Pura: From the Margins of the Margins

November 19-20, 2014

Poetry Reading and Workshop

Join the Guild Literary Complex for a reading co-sponsored by the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium with poets Daniel Borzutzky and Justin Petropoulos, who will excavate the social and political territory of margins in the Guild Complex’s monthly reading series.

Margins, Marginality, Marginalized bodies and voices, Colonialism, “Latino/a Literature” are some of the contemporary yet enduring concepts that permeate November’s edition of Palabra Pura. Curated and hosted by the poet and educator Paul Martinez Pompa, the program will be held at La Bruquena Restaurant (2726 West Division Street 61, upstairs) on Wednesday, November 19, 7:30–9:00 p.m. The program is free and open to the public. It begins with an open mic, and will include readings from and discussion led by the featured poets: Daniel Borzutzky and Justin Petropoulos.

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium will be hosting a reading and workshop with Daniel Borzutzky and Justin Petropoulos on Thursday, November 20th, 12:30pm in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201). Contact Todd Nordgren (<ahref=”mailto:ToddNordgren2018@u.northwestern.edu?>ToddNordgren2018@u.northwestern.edu) for copies of the readings for this workshop.

THE ARTISTS

Daniel Borzutzky was born in Pennsylvania, of Chilean heritage. His books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, forthcoming); The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011); the two full-length volumes of poetry, The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007); a poetry chapbook, Failure in the Imagination (2007), and Arbitrary Tales (Ravena Press, 2005). He has translated a number of works by Chilean writers, including Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (Action Books, forthcoming) and Jame Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been recognized by grants from the PEN American Center, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. He has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Koç University in Istanbul, and Wilbur Wright College of the City Colleges of Chicago.

Justin Petropoulos is the author of two collections of poetry, Eminent Domain (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011)—selected by Anne Waldman for the 2010 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize

(Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), a collaborative work with multimedia artist, Carla Gannis. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Gulf Coast, Mandorla, Portland Review, and Spinning Jenny. Justin is a contributing editor for Entropy magazine and the program director of an after-school program for at-risk, elementary age children. He is also an adjunct faculty member at New Jersey City University, where he teaches composition and creative writing.

THE CURATOR

Born and raised in suburban Chicago, Paul Martinez Pompa holds his MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. He is the author of My Kill Adore Him, a collection of poems published by the University of Notre Dame Press (2009) and a chapbook, Pepper Spray (2006). He is a recent recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. He teaches composition and poetry at Triton College and lives in Chicago.

The Guild Literary Complex’s “From the Margins of the Margins” is co-sponsored by Poetry and Poetics Colloquium; the Latina/o Studies Program; the Department of Spanish & Portuguese; and the Center for the Writing Arts.

Rosa Alcalá

October 23-24, 2014

Poetry Reading and Workshop

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, the Department of English, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Latina and Latino Studies Program, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities present a reading on Thursday, October 23rd, 5pm and and a workshop on Friday, October 24th, 12:00pm with poet and scholar Rosa Alcalá. Both events will be held in University Hall 201. Contact Todd Nordgren (ToddNordgren2018@u.northwestern.edu) to receive the reading for the workshop on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “The Politics of Translation” and Alcalá’s documentary and investigative work.

Rosa Alcalá is the author of two books of poetry, Undocumentaries (2010) and The Lust of Unsentimental Waters (2012), both from Shearsman Books. Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), edited and translated by Alcalá, was runner-up for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is also the recipient of a 2015 NEA Fellowship in Translation.

Alcalá teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Yopie Prins

May 30th, 2014

Workshop

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and the Classical Receptions Workshop is proud to present a workshop with renowned scholar Yopie Prins May 30th, from 12:00-2:00pm in Kresge 2-370. For a copy of the paper, please contact Toby Altman (TobyAltman2017@u.northwestern.edu). Lunch will be served.

Yopie Prins is professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Ladies’ Greek:Translations of Tragedy (forthcoming from Princeton University Press) and Victorian Sappho (Princeton, 1999). With Virginia Jackson, she co-edited The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Johns Hopkins, 2014). She also co-edited Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (Cornell, 1997), and she co-edited and translated The Defiant Muse: Dutch and
Flemish Feminist Poems (Feminist Press, 1997).

Avital Ronell

May 15, 2014

Lecture

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, the Department of German, and the Critical Theory Cluster are proud to present a lecture by renowned scholar and theorist Avital Ronell. The lecture will be held on Thursday May 15th, from 4:30-6:00pm in Harris 108.

Avital Ronell, University Professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU, is the author of numerous highly innovative and widely influential works, including Life Extreme: an Illustrated Guide to New Life (with Eduardo Kac, 2007), The Test Drive (2005), Stupidity (2002), Finitude’s Score (1994), Crack Wars (1992), The Telephone Book (1989), and Dictations (1986). The UberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell was published in 2006. Her conversations with Ann Dufourmantelle were translated into English under the title Fighting Theory (2010), and a volume of essays on her work, Reading Ronell, appeared in 2009. Among her most recent works are “The Tactlessness of an Unending Fadeout” as a forward to Jeremy Fernando’s “adieu” (2011) and Loser Sons: Politics and Authority (2012).

Lacy Rumsey

May 8th, 2014

Workshop

Poets have long attended to the formal potential of the pitch patterns of the human voice, with the best known example in English probably being Robert Frost’s concern for the interplay between poetic meter and “sentence-sounds”. However, it is in non-metrical poetry that intonation may play a particularly important role. Intonation has attracted only occasional attention from critics and prosodists, principally because of the perceived difficulty of predicting how a poem will be voiced. This talk will argue that, though a prosody based on intonation may be a fragile resource, it is by no means a negligible one, and that poets including Pound, Ginsberg and Prynne have used it to powerful effect.

Lacy Rumsey is Associate Professor in British and American Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He has published many articles on twentieth-century poetry, with a particular focus on the analysis of rhythm. In 2009, he organised the conference “Rhythm in Twentieth-Century British Poetry” at ENS Lyon; the acts are to appear later this year. He is also ENS Lyon’s Associate Director of International Strategy.

Angelica Freitas and Hilary Kaplan

May 2nd, 2014

Poetry Reading and Workshop

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese are pleased to welcome Brazilian poet Angelica Freitas and translator Hilary Kaplan to Northwestern for a bilingual workshop and a reading in the Hagstrum Room, University Hall 201, from 12:00 – 2:00 pm on Friday May 2nd. Freitas and Kaplan will both read from their work and discuss Kaplan’s recent translation of Rilke Shake (phoneme books, 2014). Lunch will be served.

Angelica Freitas (b. 1973) is the author of Rilke Shake (Coasc Naify, 2007) and Um útero é do tamanho de um punho (Cosac Naify, 2012). Her graphic novel, Guadalupe (2012) published by Companhia das Letras, was illustrated by Odyr Bernardi. Freitas’s poems have been translated and published in German, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, and English. She was awarded a Programa Petrobas Cultural writing fellowship in 2009. Freitas co-edits the poetry journal Modo de Usar & Co. and lives in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Hilary Kaplan’s translations of Brazilian poetry and fiction appear inLitro, Machado de Assis, PEN America, Rattapallax, Two Lines, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She received a PEN Translation Fund award for Rilke Shake, a book of poems by Angélica Freitas, and a Rumos Literatura grant for literary criticism from Itaú Cultural. Her writing on Brazilian poetry and poetics has been published in Jacket2and the collection Deslocamentos Críticos (Babel, 2011). She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Brown University.

Cecilia Vicuña

April 21-22, 2014

Poetry Reading

For a full video of Cecilia Vicuña’s reading, please click here.

Cecilia Vicuña will read from her extensive and rich body of work in Harris Hall 108 , Monday, April 21 5pm. On Tuesday, April 22nd at 12:30pm in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201), she will lead an informal seminar on the role of poetry in the transformation of the world.

Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña performs and exhibits her work widely in Europe, Latin America and the US. She is also a political activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy. She has been creating “precarious works”, ephemeral installations in nature, cities and museums since 1966, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” She has taught in indigenous communities, and at universities such as Naropa University, Denver University, SUNY Purchase and Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her visual work has been exihibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Whitecahel Art Gallery in London, the Whitney, and MoMA, among many others.She is the author of 16 books translated into several languages, including Palabrarmas (2005), I Tu, (2004), Instan, (2003), El Templo (2001), UL, Four Mapuche Poets, edited by Cecilia Vicuña (1998), Samara, Ed. Museo Rayo (1987). La Wik’uña (1990), Palabrarmas (1984), Luxumei o el Traspié de la Doctrina, (1983), and SABORAMI, (1973). Works translated into English include Templo e’Saliva / Spit Temple, a collection of her oral performances, (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Cloud‐Net (1999), QUIPOem, The Precarious, The Art & Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña (1997), Unravelling Words & The Weaving of Water, edited by Eliot Weinberger (1992), and Precario/Precarious, Tanam Press, New York 1983. With Ernesto Livron-Grosman, she edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009).

Currents in Latina/o Poetry:

Laurie Ann Guerrero and Rich

Villar

April 17, 2014

Poetry Reading

Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the South Side of San Antonio, she received the Academy of American Poets Prize, among others, at Smith College. Winner of the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, her first full-length collection, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, selected by Francisco X. Alarcón, was released by University of Notre Dame Press in 2013. Guerrero’s poetry and critical work have appeared in Huizache, Texas Monthly, Bellevue Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Global City Review, Texas Observer, Chicana/Latina Studies, Feminist Studies, and others. Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College and an MFA in poetry from Drew University. Guerrero’s chapbook, Babies under the Skin (2008), won the Panhandler Publishing Award, chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye. A CantoMundo fellow and member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Guerrero’s work has been highlighted in the LA Review of Books, The Poetry Foundation/Harriet Blog, and Poets & Writers Magazine in which she was named one of ten top-emerging poets in 2013. Other honors include fellowships from the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award Foundation and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. Guerrero has served on the faculty at Palo Alto College, University of the Incarnate Word, University of Texas-El Paso, and Gemini Ink, a community-centered literary arts organization in San Antonio. She where she is a visiting writer at Our Lady of the Lake University.

Rich Villar is a writer originally from Paterson, New Jersey. He directs Acentos, an organization fostering audiences and community around Latino/a literature. He has been quoted on Latino literature and culture by both The New York Times and the Daily News, and his poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Renaissance Noire, Hanging Loose, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Sou’wester. His first collection, COMPREHENDING FOREVER, is forthcoming in 2014 from Willow Books.

The Voice Within Us: A Poetry

Reading by Y.O.U. Students

April 17, 2014

Poetry Reading

For a full video of the performance, please click here.

The Voice Within Us program is a partnership between the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Y.O.U. (Youth Organizations Umbrella, Inc.), a youth development agency that provide services and leadership to meet the emerging needs of young people and their families in the Evanston community. The program consists of a series of poetry workshops with Y.O.U. students. The workshops are led by talented Northwestern students and overseen by faculty associated with Northwestern’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium. A public reading at Northwestern University during National Poetry Month showcases the creative talent of the the Y.O.U. Students, and celebrates their work with the publication of a limited edition chapbook.

Working Poems: an Evening with

Mark Nowak

February 26, 2014

Poetry Reading

Poet, playwright, essayist and cultural critic Mark Nowak will respond to The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940 exhibition at the Block Museum in a reading and conversation. In the spirit of the Left Front, his poems give voice to working people, documenting the hardships wrought by economic downturns both here in the United States and around the world.

Frank Cunningham, Business Representative at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134 and a participant in the first workshop Nowak conducted in Chicago, will join Nowak for the program.

Mark Nowak is the author of three volumes of poetry, all from Coffee House Press: Revenants (2000), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Coal Mountain Elementary (2009). A 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, Nowak is currently the director of the graduate creative writing program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY. This program is in partnership with the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium, American Studies, and Harris Feinsod’s course, “The Poetry of History in the Americas.”

Katie Peterson

February 13, 2013

Poetry Reading and Workshop on Manuscript Practice

Katie Peterson is the author of two new collections of poetry, Permission (New Issues, September 9 2013) and The Accounts (University of Chicago, September 24, 2013). Her first book, This One Tree, was selected by William Olsen for the New Issues Poetry Prize and published in 2006. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and teaches at Tufts University. She has reviewed poetry for the Chicago Tribune, the New Orleans Review, and the Boston Review. Her most recent essay on contemporary poetry, “New Nature,” was published in the Boston Review this spring and featured on the website Poetry Daily. A new poem, “Filibuster to Delay the Spring,” just received the 2013 Stanley Kunitz Award from the American Poetry Review, and will appear on the back page of the September / October issue.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Summer Literary Seminars and Yaddo. Her poem “Translations” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005. That poem appears in Permission.

Peterson earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a doctorate in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard, where her dissertation on Emily Dickinson won the Howard Mumford Jones Prize. She has taught at Deep Springs College and Bennington College. In the summer of 2013, she co-taught the Summer Seminar at Deep Springs College, “Ethics, Aesthetics, and Community.” She was born in California.

Drinking Gourd Chapbook Release

with Ed Roberson, Rodney Gomez

and More

January 30th, 2014

Poetry Reading and Performance

For a complete video of the performance, please click here.

Ed Roberson is Distinguished Artist in Residence at Northwestern. He was the recipient of the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2008, & was honored at the recent Literature, Culture, & Critique conference. Roberson is the author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2010); The New Wing of the Labyrinth (2009); City Eclogue (2006); Atmosphere Conditions, winner of the 2000 National Poetry Award series; Just In: Word of Navigational Change (1998); Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In, winner of the 1994 Iowa Poetry Prize; as well as earlier books.

Rodney Gomez is the author of Mouth Filled with Night (Northwestern, 2014), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, Blackbird, Devil’s Lake, Salt Hill, Fourteen Hills, Drunken Boat, Texas Poetry Review, and other journals. Born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, he earned a BA from Yale and an MFA from the University of Texas—Pan American. He works as an urban planner specializing in public transportation projects. He has also served on the board of Migrant Health Promotion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health and well being of migrants, immigrants, and related populations. He edits the literary journal Axolotl.

Since 2008, Jarochicaonos Xicago have been gathering in Pilsen as a music and dance youth workshop to learn the Son Jarocho tradition, building and celebrating community. They help to teach the Son Chiquitos language and music immersion program for young children and are the organizers of Talleres en la 18, free, weekly, open-to-the-public sessions for learning to dance and play jarocho music. Jarochicanos have presented their music at many celebrations and events, including programs for children and families such as the Old Town School of Folk Music, Lollapalooza Kids’ Stage and Chicago Public Libraries. Son Jarocho traditions from the state of Veracruz, México, reflect the mix of three American cultures—Indigenous, Spanish, and African, and their interwoven history since the time of Conquest. Communities continue the tradition of the Son Jarocho fandango, gathering around the tarima, a wooden dance platform, to exchange verses about life and love.

David Lloyd with Olga Ridgway and Elisa Sutherland

November 20, 2013

Poetry Reading and Performance

David Lloyd born in Dublin, is a writer and critic currently living in California and teaching at the University of California, Riverside. Arc & Sill: Poems 1979-2009, (Shearsman Books and New Writers Press, 2012) collects his five previous books of poetry: Taropatch (Oakland: Jimmy’s House of Knowledge, 1985),Coupures (Dublin: hardPressed Poetry, 1987), Change of State (Berkeley: Cusp Books, 1993), Sill, (Los Angeles: Cusp Books, 2006), and Vega (Los Angeles: Mind Made Books, 2009). His play, The Press, has had staged readings in Dublin, Los Angeles, Liverpool, and Manila, and premiered at Liverpool Hope University in 2010. As a critic, he works on Irish literature and culture and on poetry and aesthetics. His most recent critical book is Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800-2000: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge, 2011). He is also the editor of Cusp Books, a chap book press based in Los Angeles.

Olga Ridgway is a doctoral student studying with Alan Chow at Northwestern University. She has been a prizewinner of the Music Teachers National competition (Illinois State Competition), the Ibla Grand Prize International Piano Competition, the Thaviu-Isaac Piano Competition, Union League Piano Competition and the Central Asian Piano Competition. Olga received a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from Tashkent State Conservatory and subsequently studied at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, Belgium. Moving to Chicago in 2003, she received a full scholarship to study at Chicago College of Performing Arts at the studio of professor Ludmila Lazar and later completed a master of music degree from Roosevelt University.

Elisa Sutherland is a mezzo-soprano from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is a current second year Master’s student in Northwestern’s Voice and Opera program, where she has appeared as Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea, Lucrezia in William Bolcom’s Lucrezia, Nancy in Albert Herring, Jennie Hildebrand in Street Scene, and as a special guest, Marlena von Schnapps, in Die Fledermaus. She graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern’s double degree program in 2012 with a Bachelor of Music in Voice and Opera and a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing.

Nikky Finney

October 29, 2013

Poetry Reading

Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). The John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997) edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co- founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.

Michael Robbins

May 22, 2013

Listen to a recording of Robbins’s reading.

Poetry Reading

Michael Robbins is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012) and Equipment for Living (Simon & Schuster, forthcoming). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He reviews books regularly for the London Review of Books and several other publications, and music for SPIN. He received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago.

Marjorie Perloff

May 15, 2013

Poetry Lecture

Marjorie Perloff is one of the most influential critics of modern Anglo-American and European poetry at work today. She is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford Emerita, and is currently scholar-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Her books include: Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010), The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir (New Directions Books, 2004) ; The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, with a New Preface (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 1996).

Craig Santos Perez

May 1 & 2, 2013

Poetry Reading and Workshop

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of two collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010), a finalist for the LA Times 2010 Book Prize for Poetry and the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry. He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing.

Erica Hunt and Harryette Mullen

February 5 & 6, 2013

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Hunt and Mullen’s reading.

Poetry Reading and Workshop

Erica Hunt is the author of three books of poetry, Arcade (with artist Alison Saar), Piece Logic and Local History. Her essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” in Charles Bernstein’s The Politics of Poetic Form, put her in the forefront of experimental poets. She has received fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and a 2001 grant for poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. A leading expert on Black social justice and economic issues and the 2008 recipient of Spelman College’s award for National Community Service, she was executive director of the 21st Century Foundation located in Harlem from 1999 to 2010.

Harryette Mullen is a poet and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and African-American literature. She is the author of Sleeping with the Dictionary, a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award, as well as numerous other books of poetry, including S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Blues Baby. She is also the author of the critical study “Freeing the Soul: Race, Subjectivity and Difference in Slave Narratives.” In 2010 Mullen was awarded the Jackson Poetry Prize by Poets and Writers Magazine.

Cedar Sigo

November 1, 2012

Listen to a recording of Cedar Sigo’s reading

Poetry Reading and Workshop

Cedar Sigo is a San Francisco poet and the author of the full-length collections Stranger in Town (2010) and Selected Writings (2005), as well as numerous chapbooks. He was raised on the Suquamish reservation near Seattle, Washington, and studied at The Naropa Institute with poets Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, and Joanne Kyger, among others. Sigo’s poetry draws on personal experience and a host of cultural material, which is then culled into sculpted lyrical collages.

Sigo has given poetry readings at The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, P.S. One Museum of Contemporary Art, The San Francisco Poetry Center, San Francisco Art Institute, and Beyond Baroque. He has collaborated with visual artists including Colter Jacobsen, Frank Haines, Cecilia Dougherty, and Will Yackulic, and has recently blogged for SF MOMA and The Poetry Foundation.

Poets in/on Translation

October 12, 2012

Poetry Reading and Workshop

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945, a largely Polish city that became a part of the Soviet Ukraine shortly after his birth. His ethnic Polish family, which had lived for centuries in Lvov, was then forcibly repatriated to Poland. A major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti‐Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Zagajewski is today one of the most well‐known and highly regarded contemporary Polish poets in Europe and the United States. His luminous, searching poems are imbued by a deep engagement with history, art, and life. He enjoys a wide international readership, and his poetry survives translation with unusual power. Zagajewski’s most recent books in English are Unseen Hand (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011); Eternal Enemies (FSG, 2008); and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Zagajewski’s other collections of poetry include Mysticism for Beginners (1999), Canvas (1991), andTremor: Selected Poems (1985). He is also the author of a book of essays and literary sketches, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995), and of Solidarity, Solitude: Essays.

Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi, Umbria, and lives in Rome. Since 1974, she has published five volumes of poetry with Einaudi, including Sempre aperto teatro, 1999 (Theatre Always Open) which won the prestigious Premio Viareggio Repaci and Pigre divinità e pigra sorte, 2006 (Lazy Gods and Lazy Fate) for which she received the Premio Internazionale Pasolini. Bilingual editions of her poems have been published in France, Canada, Mexico, and Germany. She has contributed to numerous magazines and reviews, including Poetry and The New Yorker. Cavalli also has translated Moliere’s Amphytrion, Wilde’s Salome, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Othello.

Clare Cavanagh is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (2010), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Cavanagh is one of the preeminent translators of contemporary Polish poetry, and has translated numerous collections from poets including Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. She is currently working on the authorized biography of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Cavanagh’s many awards for translation include the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation and the PEN/Book‐of‐the‐Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation. Her translation of Wislawa Szymborska’s latest volume, Here (2010), won the Found in Translation Award. Cavanagh’s many honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her criticism and reviews have been widely published in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Poetry, and the New York Review of Books, among others. Other works of scholarship include Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1995), which received the AATSEEL Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Slavic Literature.

Nathaniel Tarn

May 3, 2012

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Tarn’s reading.

Poetry Reading

Nathaniel Tarn is a distinguished poet, anthropologist, translator, and editor. Born in Paris in 1928 and raised in France, Belgium and England, he took his degree in History and English at Cambridge. After some journalism and radio work in Paris, he discovered anthropology, studying under Claude Lévi-Strauss and others at the Musée de l’Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France, and the University of Chicago. He completed fieldwork in Guatemala in 1951-2 and Burma in 1958-1960, after which he became Lecturer in South East Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1960-1967). Tarn published his first volume of poetry, Old Savage/Young City, with Jonathan Cape, London in 1964, and a popular translation of Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu in 1966. From 1967-1969, he built a groundbreaking poetry program at Cape as General Editor of the international series Cape Editions, which brought many French and Latin American writers into English for the first time, and as a Founding Director of Cape-Goliard Press, which specialized in contemporary American Poetry with emphasis on Olson, Duncan, Zukofsky, and their peers and successors.

In 1970, with a foremost interest in the American literary scene, he immigrated to the U.S., and he eventually became a citizen. He has taught at Princeton, Rutgers, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Manchuria (PRC), and he has read and lectured all over he world. His most well known books of poetry are The Beautiful Contradictions (1969), A Nowhere for Vallejo (1972), Lyrics for the Bride of God (1975), The House of Leaves (1976), and, most recently, Selected Poems, 1950-2000 (2002). As literary & cultural critic, he has published two volumes: Views from the Weaving Mountain (1988) and The Embattled Lyric (2007). As translator, he is known as the first to render Segalen’s “Stèles” into English, and for his continued work on Neruda, Latin American and French poets. Tarn has published over thirty books and booklets in his various disciplines.

Keorapetse Kgositsile

April 23, 2012

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Kgositsile’s reading.

Poetry Reading

Keorapetse Kgositsile is a South African poet and political activist whose international influence has spanned decades. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including This Way I Salute You (Kwela, 2004), If I Could Sing (Kwela, 2002), and My Name is Afrika (Doubleday, 1971), as well as the scholarly study Beyond Words: South African Poetics (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2009); he is also the editor of The Word Is Here: Poetry from Modern Africa (Anchor, 1973).

An influential member of the African National Congress and a key figure in the Pan-African and Black Arts movements,Kgositsile spent three decades in exile from South Africa, studying at several U.S. universities, including Columbia, where he earned an MFA in Creative Writing.  His poetry, heavily influenced by jazz, merges African and African-American cultural practices into a modern art of diaspora. Kgositsile’s extensive career as a writer, teacher, and activist in the United States, Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia led to a triumphant return to South Africa after the end of apartheid.  In 2006, Kgositsile was named Poet Laureate of South Africa.

Andrei Levkin

April 17, 2012

Lecture: The Poetics of Russian Prose

With responses from Ilya Kutik and Reginald Gibbons

Andrei Levkin (who will be visiting from Moscow) is a writer of “poetic prose” related in style and stance to the contemporary Russian poetic school known as “metarealism.” The latter is centered on a particular mode of thought ‐‐ unfamiliar in English‐language poetry and prose ‐‐ that is highly metaphorical, often apophatic, and fast‐moving. Metarealism began in the 1980s (Ilya Kutik was a founder and remains one of the primary figures) and has produced a number of very widely known and highly honored poets, including Alexander Eremenko, Aleksandr Chernov, Elena Schwarts, Olga Sedakova, the late Alexei Parshchikov. It is also poetically affiliated in spirit and approach with such predecessors as Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Osip Mandelshtam, as well as more recent luminaries like Bella Akhmadulina, Victor Krivulin, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (translated in the US by Lyn Hejinian). Kutik and Gibbons are working on an anthology of translations and commentary that will present the poetics of metarealism to American readers; the only prose writer in this anthology is Andrei Levkin.

Queer(ing) Poetics Symposium

February 6-7, 2012

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Nathanaël and Wilson’s reading.

Poetry Reading: Nathalie Stephens/Nathanaël and Ronaldo V. Wilson

Workshop

Nathalie Stephens/Nathanaël writes l’entre-genre in English and French, with over a dozen books, including We Press Ourselves Plainly (Nightboat Books, 2010); Absence Where As (Claude Cahun And The Unopened Book) (Nighboat Books, 2009), which received the Prix Alain-Grandbois; At Alberta (BookThug, 2008); The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (Nightboat Books, 2007); Touch To Affliction (Coach House, 2006); Je Nathanaël (l’Hexagone, 2003); and L’Injure (l’Hexagone, 2004). Je Nathanaël exists in English self-translation (BookThug, 2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian (Paradox Publishing, 2007). In addition to self-translation, NS has translated works by Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, Bhanu Kapil, and Sina Queyras.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of Publishing Triangle’s 2010 Thom Gunn Award. He has held fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, The Anderson Center for the Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Yaddo Corporation, and has had four poems nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Christian Bök

November 2-3, 2011

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Bök’s reading.

Poetry Reading: Beyonsense with Christian Bök and Ilya Kutik

Workshop: The Xenotext Project

Christian Bök has been called a “jaw-dropping sound poet” by the Village Voice. He is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. He has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit “Poetry Plastique.” Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Claudia Roquette-Pinto
with translator John Keene

October 13-14, 2011

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Roquette-Pinto reading.

Poetry Reading

Workshop: On Roquette-Pinto’s Poetic Evolution

A native of Rio de Janiero, Claudia Roquette-Pinto is the author of five books (Os Dias Gagos [1991], Saxifraga [Editora Salamandra, 1993], Zona de sombra [Rio de Janiero: Sette Letras, 1997], Corola [Granja Viana-Cotia, Brazil: Atelie, 2001], and Margem de Manobra [Rio de Janiero: Editora Aeroplano, 2005]. Selections from these volumes have appeared in English translation in Shadow Zone [Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 1999] and The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press/Green Integer, 1997/2003). From 1986-1991, she managed Verve, a monthly publication dedicated to literature and the arts. Roquette-Pinto has also published numerous poems in anthologies and, with Regis Bonvicino, co-translated Douglas Messerli’s Primeiras Palavras [Sao Paolo: Atelie Editorial, 1999] into Portuguese.

John Keene is a founding member of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Associate Professor of English & African American Studies at Northwestern. Read his full profile here.

Raúl Zurita
with translator Anna Deeny

September 26, 2011

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Zurita’s reading.

Poetry Reading

Raúl Zurita is among the most celebrated living Latin American poets. Born in Santiago, Chile in 1950, Zurita studied engineering before turning to poetry. His early work was a courageous condemnation of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup.  During Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990)  Zurita, like many others, was arrested and tortured.  (Many prisoners were murdered.)  After his release, he co-founded a radical art collective, “Colectivo de Acción de Arte,” which used performance to sustain political resistance.  He published a trilogy of books (Purgatory, Anteparadise, andThe New Life) and was renowned for his high-energy public performances.  He famously organized skywriting of poetry over New York City and also had the words “Ni Pena Ni Miedo” (Neither Pity Nor Fear) bulldozed in the sands of the Atacama Desert, the site of ancient earth-sculptures.Zurita has received numerous awards and his work has been translated into a dozen languages.  His books in English translation include Anteparadise (translated by Jack Schmitt), Purgatory (translated by Anna Deeny), INRI (translated by William Rowe), and Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutzky).  His newest work, “Inscriptions Facing the Sea,” consists of 22 phrases to be inscribed in the cliffs of the north coast of Chile.

Anna Deeny is a translator and Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University.

Elizabeth Marie Young

June 2, 2011

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Young reading.

Poetry Reading

Workshop: On Lyric Translation: Zukofsky and Catullus

Elizabeth Marie Young is a poet and classicist who teaches at Wellesley College. Her first full collection of poems, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, won the Motherwell prize from Fence Books in 2009. A chapbook, Sonnets, came out in 2008 from Omahrahu press. Scholarly work includes an article on Ovid’s Orpheus (Representations, 2008), an article on translation and mastery in Catullus’ Phaselus poem (c.4) (Arethusa, 2011), and a chapter on lyric translation in the forthcoming collection Complicating the History of Western Translation (St. Jerome). She is in the process of writing a new collection of poems and a book on Catullan translation.

Ed Roberson

May 3, 2011

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Roberson reading.

Poetry Reading

Workshop: To See The Earth Before The End Of The World

Ed Roberson, Distinguished Artist in Residence, taught from 1990-2003 at Rutgers University, and from 2004-2006 at Columbia College in Chicago. He was the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2008, and was one of three writers honored at the recent Literature, Culture, & Critique conference, organized by Callaloo magazine.Roberson is the author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World [Wesleyan University Press]; The New Wing of the Labyrinth [Singing Horse Press]; City Eclogue, a poetry collection released in 2006; Atmosphere Conditions, winner of the 2000 National Poetry Award series; Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In, winner of the 1994 Iowa Poetry Prize; as well as earlier books, including When Thy King Is a Boy; Etai-Eken; and Lucid Interval as Integral Music.

Derek Attridge

April 27, 2011

Workshop: Is There a Case for the English Dolnik?

Derek Attridge is Professor of English at the University of York and was the Spring 2011 Segal Professor of Irish Studies in the Department of English at Northwestern. He is renowned Joyce scholar (Peculiar Language [Cornell 1988, reissued 2004], Joyce Effects [Cambridge 2000], How to Read Joyce [Granta 2007], and four additional edited or co-edited volumes on Joyce), who has an equally impressive scholarly profile in the analysis of poetic form, especially rhythmic analysis (Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres [Cambridge,1974], The Rhythms of English Poetry [Longman, 1982], Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction [Cambridge 1995], and Meter and Meaning [with Thomas Carper, Routledge 2003]). Professor Attridge has also published a number of books and articles on literary theory, many of them reflecting his long association with Jacques Derrida, including The Singularity of Literature (Routledge 2004) and Reading and Responsibility (Edinburgh 2010).

Tomás Urayoán Noel

February 21, 2011

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Noel’s lecture.

Lecture: Bodies That Antimatter: U.S. Latino/a Poetics in the Digital Decade, 2000-2009

Workshop: Translating the Self

Tomás Urayóan Noel is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany–SUNY. His areas of research include Latino/a Literatures and Cultures and poetics of the Americas, and he is at work on a book-length study of the history and poetics of Nuyorican Poetry. He is also the author of the poetry collections Kool Logic/La lógica kool (2005), Boringkén (2008), and Hi-Density Politics (2010).

Jahan Ramazani

October 26, 2010

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Ramazani’s lecture.

Lecture: Poetry, the Postcolonial, and the Dialogic

Workshop: Transnational Poetics

Jahan Ramazani is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Transnational Poetics (2009); The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). He edited the most recent edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and, with Jon Stallworthy, The Twentieth Century and After, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006).

He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize.

M. NourbeSe Philip

May 12, 2010

Listen to the UniVerse of Poetry/WBEZ recording of Philip’s reading.

Poetry Reading

Workshop: The Poetics of Zong!

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet and writer originally from Tobago, now living in Canada. Her recent book Zong! is a striking kind of history that enacts a near impossibility of articulation; a linguistic, typographical and poetic experiment of ellision, overlapping, and syntax in shards; multiple voices and authorship; and more. Her interest in African diasporic experience, her awards from the Casa de las Americas, and the variety and originality of her books have made her an essential writer of our time. For more about her and her books, see: www.nourbese.com.

Samuel Weber

April 29, 2010

Workshop: On Friedrich Hölderlin

Samuel Weber is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern and co-director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory. Weber studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book, Prisms, he co-translated into English. The translation of and introduction to Theodor Adorno’s most important book of cultural criticism helped define the way in which the work of the Frankfurt School would be read and understood in the English-speaking world. Professor Weber has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation. In the 1980s he worked in Germany as a “dramaturge” in theater and opera productions. Out of the confrontation of that experience with his work in critical theory came the book Theatricality as Medium, published in 2004 by Fordham University Press. In 2005 he published Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking, also at Fordham. His most recent book is Benjamin’s -abilities, published by Harvard UP. That book, as well as several others, are currently being translated into Chinese and will be published by Beijing University Press. His current research projects include “Toward a Politics of Singularity” and “The Uncanny.” Professor Weber began teaching at the Free University of Berlin and subsequently taught at the Johns Hopkins University and UCLA before coming to Northwestern in 2001.