Past Readings and Lectures
2008-2009:
September 18 -- Paula Bohince (Red Weather Reading Series), 112 Walker Bldg
Paula Bohince was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1976 and grew up there. Her poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear, in such publications as Agni, Antioch Review, Literary Imagination, Ontario Review, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, Slate, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, and Poetry Daily Essentials 2007. She has received the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Grolier Poetry Prize, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony. She taught at New York University, where she received her MFA, the New School, and elsewhere, and was recently the University of Mississippi's inaugural Summer Poet-in-Residence. From Feb. 1 - July 15, 2008, she was the Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts, the first woman to hold this Fellowship. Bohince currently lives in Pennsylvania, and has recently taught Twentieth Century American Literature at Seton Hill University.
September 25th--The Emily Dickinson Lecture—Li-Young Lee
THE EMILY DICKINSON LECTURE,
COURTESY OF GEORGE AND BARBARA KELLY,
PRESENTS:
LI-YOUNG LEE, POET
NITTANY LION BALLROOM, A-B, 7:30pm
“What characterizes Lee’s poetry is a certain humility…a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness.” — Gerald Stern
Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008). His earlier collections are Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001); Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lee's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1988 he received the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.
Born in 1957 of Chinese parents in Jakarta, Indonesia, Lee learned early about loss and exile. His great grandfather was China's first republican President, and his father, a deeply religious Christian, was physician to Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Lee's parents escaped to Indonesia. In 1959, his father, after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno's jails, fled Indonesia with his family to escape anti-Chinese sentiment. After a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964.
Through the observation and translation of often unassuming and silent moments, the poetry of Li-Young Lee gives clear voice to the solemn and extraordinary beauty found within humanity. By employing hauntingly lyrical skill and astute poetic awareness, Lee allows silence, sound, form, and spirit to emerge brilliantly onto the page. His poetry reveals a dialogue between the eternal and the temporal, and accentuates the joys and sorrows of family, home, loss, exile, and love. In “The City In Which I love You,” the central long poem in his second collection, Li-Young Lee asks, “Is prayer, then, the proper attitude/for the mind that longs to be freely blown,/but which gets snagged on the barb/called world, that/tooth-ache, the actual?” Anyone who has seen him read will add that Lee is also one of the finest poetry readers alive.
ABOUT Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton)
A highly anticipated collection from one of the most powerful voices at work in America today. Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the most beloved poets in the US. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love.
October 2--Eloise Klein Healy (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry and three spoken word recordings. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy directed the Women's Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman's Building in Los Angeles. She is Resident Poet at the Idyllwild Summer Poetry Festival, the co-founder of ECO-ARTS, an eco-tourism/arts venture, and founding editor of ARKTOI BOOKS, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Her latest collection of poems is The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho.
October 9-- G.C. Waldrep (Red Weather Reading Series), 112 Walker Bldg
G.C. Waldrep's first book of poems, Goldbeater's Skin, won the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry as well as a Greenwall award from the Academy of American Poets. His second full-length collection, Disclamor, appeared from BOA Editions in 2007. He is also the author of two chapbooks, "The Batteries" (New Michigan Press, 2006) and "One Way No Exit" (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Tin House, New American Writing, and other journals. His work has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He has been selected for residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature. Waldrep holds degrees in American history from both Harvard and Duke and an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. He is also the author of a nonfiction book, Southern Workers and the Search for Community, which won the 2001 Illinois Prize for history. He currently teaches creative writing at Bucknell University, where he also directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.
October 23--Nahid Rachlin (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Nahid Rachlin (http://www.nahidrachlin.com) went to MFA programs at Columbia University and Stanford University. Among her publications are a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS, four novels, FOREIGNER, MARRIED TO A STRANGER, HEART'S DESIRE, JUMPING OVER FIRE, a short story collection, VEILS. Her individual stories have appeared in about fifty magazines and she has written reviews for NEW YORK TIMES. Among the grants and awards she has received are a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). Presently she teaches at the New School University and is an associate Fellow at Yale. Among the summer conferences she teaches at are Paris Writers Workshop and Provincetown Work Center.
November 6, 8 p.m., Chavisa Woods (Red Weather Reading Series), 104 Thomas Bldg
Chavisa Woods was born and raised in southern Illinois. Much of her literary work reflects the circumstances facing working class women in rural, fundamentalist America. Her short stories, essays and fiction have been published nationally and internationally in such renowned publications as: Matador, Prima Materia, Cake Poetry, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, and others. Her first full-length book of fiction, Love Does Not Make me Gentle or Kind, was released in January 2008 by Fly by Night Press, receiving outstanding reviews in the Brooklyn Rail and Go Magazine. She has been featured on WBAI's Cat Radio Cafe, as well as in the Dixon Place Theater Hot Festival, The New York Vision Festival, the Howl festival and many others. She is currently active in several literary and performance programs in and around NYC and collaborating with a contemporary artist, combining video/ animation and text from her most recent book.
November 6-7th --Theodore Roethke Centenary Celebration
November 11th—Martha Southgate (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Martha Southgate’s most recent novels are Third Girl from the Left, which won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and The Fall of Rome, which received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best
novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is the recipient of a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
November 20--Jeff Parker (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus, and other pubs. With artist William Powhida he collaborated on a collection of stories and images called The Back of the Line. He is the Acting Director of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Toronto.
January 22—Yu-Han Chao (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Yu-Han (Eugenia) Chao was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her MFA in fiction from Penn State University in 2006. Her books include a short story collection, Passport Baby, and a poetry collection, We Grow Old: 53 Chinese Love Poems. Sample her writing and artwork at http://www.yuhanchao.com
February 19--Josip Novakovich (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Josip Novakovich's is the author of stories have appeared in many publications, including The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares. He teaches at Pennsylvania State University and lives near State College, Pennsylvania.
February 26-- Paula Closson Buck (Red Weather Reading Series)
Paula Closson Buck (Ph.D. Ohio University) is an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University. She has published two books of poems: The Acquiescent Villa (1998) and Litanies Near Water (2008), both from Louisiana State University Press. Her individual poems have appeared in Agni, Agni Online, Gettysburg Review, Laurel Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and other magazines, and have been selected for Poetry Daily.
March 27--Michael Collier (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Michael Collier has published five books of poems, most recently, Dark Wild Realm. The Ledge (2000) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, he teaches at the University of Maryland and serves as the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
April 2--Sister Anne Higgins (Red Weather Reading Series)
Anne Higgins is a lecturer in English and Theology at Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. She is a member of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. She is a graduate of Saint Joseph College, The Johns Hopkins University, and the Washington Theological Union. She has had about seventy poems published in Commonweal, Yankee, Spirituality and Health, The Melic Review, The Centrifugal Eye, College English, and a variety of small magazines. Her book of poetry, At the Year's Elbow, was published by the Mellen Poetry Press in 2000, and republished by Wipf and Stock in 2006. Her second book, Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky, was published by Plain View Press in 2007. A chapbook, Pick it up and Read, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2008.
April 17—Marilynne Robinson (Community Read)
April 30--Jane Hamilton (Mary E. Rolling Reading Series)
Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's magazine. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel and was a selection of the Oprah Book Club. Her second novel, A Map of the World, was an international bestseller.
