Hi! If anyone is interested in going to any of these, let me know. It'd be fun to go and have a glass of wine/snacks at my house (just a minute off campus) afterwards. After reading The Round House, it seems that Sherman Alexie's reading on March 5 might be interesting.
xo,
Fiona
"Performing Texts is a special series sponsored by a grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities that focuses not only on the way
in which authors perform their texts, but also on the way in which texts
themselves perform.
The readings and talks listed below are free and open to the general
public. Most writers will make themselves available, following their
appearance, to answer questions from the audience and sign copies of
their books.
Amiri Baraka and Anne Waldman
Feb. 5, 7 p.m.
Keller Hall
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, N.J. He published his first volume of poetry,
Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His
Blues People: Negro Music in White America
(1963) is still regarded as the seminal work on Afro-American music and
culture. His reputation as a playwright was established with the
production of
Dutchman at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in
1964; it subsequently won an Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway Play and
was made into a film. Baraka’s numerous literary honors include
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment
for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation for
Drama, and Poet Laureate of New Jersey. His book D
igging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music was released in 2009 and was selected by the Before Columbus Foundation as the winner of the American Book Award for 2010.
Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an
active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture
she has helped create and nurture for over four decades, as a writer,
editor, master teacher, performer, scholar, curator, and activist. She
is the author of more than 40 books including the mini-classic
Fast Speaking Woman, a collection of essays entitled
Vow to Poetry, and the monumental anti-war feminist epic, T
he Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment,
a 25-year project in three volumes. Waldman is the recipient of the
prestigious Shelley Memorial Award, and The Iovis Trilogy has been
awarded the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. She was one of the
founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church
In-the-Bowery, and cofounded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School
of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first
Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere.
Anne Waldman
The Voice's Daughter: Poet as Performer
Feb. 6, 4:30 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Junot Diaz
February 19, 7 p.m.
Jepson Alumni Center
Junot DÃaz was born and raised in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. His work has appeared in
The New Yorker,
The Paris Review,
Time Out,
Glimmer Train,
Story, and
African Voices.
DÃaz’s story collection Drown was published in 1996 and is in its 23rd
printing and was sold in 15 countries. His first novel,
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the Pulitzer Prize and remained on
The New York Times and independent bookstore bestseller lists for two years. DÃaz’s next story collection,
This Is How You Lose Her,
was published in September 2012 and was a finalist for the 2012
National Book Award. A recent MacArthur Fellow, he is a professor at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Holly Hughes
Feb. 26, 7 p.m.
Modlin Center, Cousins Studio Theater
Holly Hughes is a performance artist and writer. She is the author of
more than a dozen plays and performance pieces, five of which were
collected in
Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler published by Grove Press. She is also the co-editor of three other books,
O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (with David Roman),
Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (with Una Chadhuri), and
Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café
(with Alina Troyano). She is the winner of numerous awards including a
2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lambda Book Award, a GLAAD Media Award, as
well as funding from the NEA, NYSCA, and other sources. Currently she
is professor of art and design, women’s studies, and theatre and drama
at the University of Michigan, and director of the BFA Program in
Interarts Performance.
Sherman Alexie
March 5, 7 p.m.
Jepson Alumni Center
Author, poet, and screenwriter Sherman Alexie was named one of
The New Yorker’s
top 20 writers for the 21st century. After growing up on the Spokane
Indian Reservation in Washington, Alexie tells tales of contemporary
American Indian life laced with razor-sharp humor, unsettling candor,
and biting wit. Alexie’s first novel,
Reservation Blues, won Booklist’s Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction. His second book,
Indian Killer, was a
New York Times Notable Book. His 2009 book of short stories,
War Dances, won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Alexie wrote and produced the film
Smoke Signals based on his book,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. He released
Blasphemy, an anthology of new stories and beloved classics, in October 2012.
Philip Auslander
March 19, 4 p.m.
Keller Hall
Philip Auslander’s primary research interest is in performance,
especially in relation to music, media, and technology. He has written
on aesthetic and cultural performances as diverse as theatre,
performance art, music, stand-up comedy, robotic performance, and
courtroom procedures. He is the author of five books and editor or
co-editor of two collections. His most recent books are
Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006) and the second edition of
Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2008). In addition to his work on performance, Auslander contributes art criticism regularly to
ArtForum
and other publications. He has written catalogue essays for museums and
galleries in Austria, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the
United States. He is the founding editor of
The Art Section: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary, published online ten times a year at theartsection.com.
Sharon Olds
April 9, 7 p.m.
Keller Hall
Sharon Olds is the author of eight volumes of poetry. With sensuality,
humor, and remarkable imagery, she expresses truths about domestic and
political violence, sexuality, family relationships, love, and the body.
Her numerous honors include an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Foundation
Fellowship, and being named New York State Poet Laureate from 1998–2000.
She won the San Francisco Poetry Center award for her collection
Satan Says, and received the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award for
The Dead and the Living. Her poetry has appeared in
The New Yorker,
The Paris Review,
Poetry,
The Atlantic Monthly, and
The New York Times.
Olds teaches graduate poetry workshops at New York University and
helped found a writing workshop at a 900-bed state hospital for the
severely disabled. Her most recent collection,
Stag’s Leap, was published in September 2012 and recently won Britain's TS Eliot Poetry Prize."
