2009-2010 Reading Series
Aracelis Girmay
Poetry Reading
Monday, November 23, 2009
Wendell Will Room (inside Stockwell-Mudd Library)
5:30 p.m.
Aracelis Girmay is the winner of the 2009 GLCA New Writers Award for Teeth, a collection of poetry that reflects her Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African American traditions. Nicholasa Mohr writes, "The poems of Aracelis Girmay ring out with a burning truth as she transports the reader into the world of despair, discrimination, sorrows, triumphs, joy, and the courage it takes to flourish as a woman of color." Martin Espada calls her poetry "hard, cutting, brilliant, beautiful. . . so strong, so brave, so lyrical, so fiery, so joyful, that the usual superlatives fail." A former Watson fellow and Cave Canem fellow, Girmay has published extensively in journals and literary magazines including Ploughshares, Indiana Review, and Callaloo, and is the author of a children's book, Changing, Changing: Story and Collages. Born and raised in Southern California, Girmay now leads community writing workshops throughout California and New York.
A reception and book-signing will immediately follow the reading.
Co-sponsored by the English Department and Stockwell-Mudd Library.
Melissa Delbridge
Creative Nonfiction Reading
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Wendell Will Room (inside Stockwell-Mudd Library)
5:30 p.m.
Melissa Delbridge ("...honest, funny, and fiercely Southern..." – Poets & Writers magazine) has won awards from the Southern Humanities Review and the Southern Women Writers Conference for her nonfiction and fiction. A native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, she works as an archivist at Duke University. In her essay collection, Family Bible (University of Iowa Press, 2008), she explores themes of race, gender, and sexuality as they impacted her life in the 1960s and 1970s.
A reception and book-signing will immediately follow the reading.
Co-sponsored by the English Department and Stockwell-Mudd Library.
A. Van Jordan and Blas Falconer
2010 Wilson Poets
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Olin 112
6:10 PM
A. Van Jordan is the author of three poetry collections: Quantum Lyrics; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was listed as one of the Best Books of 2005 by The Times of London; and Rise, which won the Josephine Miles PEN/Oakland award.
He has received many awards for his poetry, including a Whiting Writers Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize. His poems have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Seneca Review, and Poetry 30: An Anthology of Thirty Poets in Their Thirties.
Blas Falconer is the author of the poetry collection A Question of Gravity and Light, and a chapbook The Perfect Hour. He is also the co-editor of both Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (forthcoming 2010) and The Other Latina/o: Diverging Lines in the New Canon (forthcoming 2011).
He has received several awards for his poetry, most recently the Maureen Egan Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. His poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Puerto del Sol, Luna, Indiana Review, and Green Mountains Review.
A reception and book-signing will immediately follow the reading.
Sponsored by the Department of English and made possible by a generous donation from Mr. and Mrs. C. Thomas Wilson.