The course will offer readings and discussions with prominent fiction writers and poets. The writers will meet with us weekly during the course of the semester. The purpose of the course is to give students a chance to interact with and question a diverse range of visiting guest writers about their processes and techniques in an effort to expand and further develop the student's own writing. As with all of our process courses, the goal is to learn--in this case, first-hand--from other writers and their writings in order to better inform our sense of what it means to be a poet or fiction writer in 2011.English Department faculty, undergraduate English majors (especially those concentrating in Creative Writing), and English-Department graduate students are invited to attend these events.
Faculty and students FROM THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT ONLY, please.
Here is the schedule for Writers on Writing. Please feel free to attend any of these classes -- the visiting writers are all excellent. If you know in advance that you're coming, please let Professor Lewis Warsh know. But if you decide to come spur of the moment that's not a problem.
SCHEDULE for Writers on Writing
We meet Monday 6:30-8:50 in 4th floor lounge
Jan 31 -- Elizabeth Willis -- Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan U Press)
Feb 7 -- Gary Lenhart -- The World In A Minute (Hanging Loose)
Feb 14 -- Samuel Delany -- The Motion of Light in Water (Wesleyan U Press is the most recent edition -- there are others)
Feb 28 -- Ron Padgett -- How to Be Perfect (Coffee House)
March 7 -- Tracie Morris
March 21 -- Laird Hunt -- Ray of the Star (Coffee House)
March 28 -- Wang Ping -- either The Magic Whip or The Last Communist Virgin (both Coffee House)
April 4 -- Monica de la Torre -- Public Domain (Roof Books)
April 11 -- Bob Holman
April 18 -- Renee Gladman -- Event Factory (Dorothy, A Publishing Project)
ELIZABETH WILLIS is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006) and Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003). Her collection, The Human Abstract (Penguin 1995) was a winner of the National Poetry Series. A fifth work entitled Address is forthcoming in January. Willis has been awarded fellowships in poetry from the California Arts Council and the Howard Foundation and has held residencies at Brown University, University of Denver, Naropa University, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille. She earned a Ph.D in Poetics from SUNY at Buffalo in 1994. Recently she edited a collection of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, published in 2008 by University of Iowa Press. She was Distinguished Writer in Residence at Mills College from 1999 to 2002. Currently she is Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.
GARY LENHART is the author of six collections of poetry, including The World in a Minute (2010), Father and Son Night (1999), and Light Heart (1991) from Hanging Loose Press and One at a Time (United Artists, 1983). His published prose includes The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Another Look: Selected Prose (Subpress, 2010). He was also an editor of Clinch: Selected Poems of Michael Scholnick (Coffee House, 1998) and The Teachers & Writers Guide to Classic American Literature (T&W, 2001), and edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams (1998). He has contributed poems, essays, and reviews to many magazines and anthologies, and edited the magazines Mag City and Transfer. He has taught at Dartmouth College since 1996.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, JR. is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966[1] and 1967[2] respectively), Nova, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. He is the author of numerous autobiographical works, including The Motion of Light in Water. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Between 1988 and 1999 he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Between 1999 and 2000 he was a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.
RON PADGETT's books include the poetry collections How to Be Perfect, You Never Know, Great Balls of Fire, and New & Selected Poems, as well as three memoirs, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan; Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers; and Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard. Padgett is also the editor of The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms and World Poets. His translations include Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems, Guillaume Apollinaire's Poet Assassinated, and, with Bill Zavatsky, Valery Larbaud's Poems of A. O. Barnabooth. He has collaborated with artists such as Jim Dine, Alex Katz, George Schneeman, and Joe Brainard. For ten years he worked as a poet-in-the-schools, and for twenty years he was the publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Padgett has received Fulbright, NEA, Guggenheim, and Civitella Ranieri grants and fellowships, and was named Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2008 he was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He also received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. For more information, go to www.ronpadgett.com.
TRACIE MORRIS is an interdisciplinary poet and scholar who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer, bandleader and multimedia performer. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial, Ronald Feldman Gallery, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and the New Museum. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Dr. Morris is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. She is completing two books: an academic work WhoDo with Words on the work of philosopher J.L. Austin and a poetry collection, Rhyme Scheme, as well as an untitled CD with music.
LAIRD HUNT is the author of a book of short stories, The Paris Stories (2000), from Smokeproof Press, and four novels, The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003) The Exquisite (2006) and Ray of the Star (2009) all from Coffee House Press. His writings, reviews and translations have appeared in the United States and abroad in, among other places, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, Grand Street, The Believer, Fence, Conjunctions, Brick, Mentor, Inculte, and Zoum Zoum. He is currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program.
WANG PING has published numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including
American Visa (1994), Foreign Devil (1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (1998), The Magic Whip (2003) and The Last Communist Virgin (2007). An expanded version of her doctoral dissertation on foot-binding in China--Aching for Beauty--was published in 2000. She has also edited an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999). She received her M.A. from the English department at Long Island University and her PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU. She is presently an Associate Professor in the English Department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
MONICA DE LA TORRE is the author of two poetry books published in the U.S., Talk Shows (Switchback, 2007) and Public Domain (Roof Books, 2008), and two poetry books published in Mexico City, Acúfenos (Taller Ditoria, 2006) and Sociedad Anónima (Bonobos, 2010). She is translator of a volume of selected poems by neo-Baroque Mexican poet Gerardo Deniz (Lost Roads, 2000) and co-editor of the anthology of post-Latino poetry Malditos latinos, malditos sudacas: Poesía hispanoamericana Made in USA (El billar de Lucrecia, 2009). Recently she has participated in the collaborative book projects Collective Task and Taller de Taquimecanografía. She is senior editor at BOMB magazine and a 2009 NYFA fellow in poetry.
BOB HOLMAN is a poet best known as a ringmaster of the spoken word/slam scene, but somehow he's got ten books under his belt and teaches at Columbia and NYU. He also founded Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a spoken word label, produced the award-winning PBS series, The United States of Poetry, and worked at the St Marks Poetry Project and Nuyorican Poets Cafe before he founded the Bowery Poetry Club. He is currently working on a documentary about the poetry of Endangered Languages.
RENEE GLADMAN is the author of Arlem, Not Right Now, Juice The Activist, A Picture Feeling, and Newcomer Can't Swim. Since 2004, she has been the editor and publisher of Leon Works, a series of books of experimental prose. She was previously the editor of the Leroy chapbook series, publishing innovative poetry and prose by emerging writers. She is Assistant Professor Literary Arts at Brown University.
