Pictures from Eduardo Chirinos Reading

Thanks to Professor Patrice McSherry (Political Science Department, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program) for these great shots from the Eduardo Chrinos poetry reading.

Chirinos appeared along with his longtime translator, Professor Gary Racz (Department of Foreign Languages and Literature), who read the poems in English, after Chirinos had read them in Spanish.

Click here to read more about Chirinos.

Eduardo Chirinos

Professor Racz with Chirinos

Lili Taylor to Perform Work by Jessica Hagedorn at Cave Canem Event

The actress Lili Taylor will perform a monologue in the character of Nena from Stairway to Heaven by Professor  Jessica Hagedorn (English Department, Creative Writing MFA program). This performance will be part of a program called "Cave Canem Brings the Drama."



Click here for more information.

Voices of the Rainbow Event: Paola Corso & Sandra Maria Esteves

 Please join us for the next reading of the Fall 2011 semester: Paola Corso & Sandra Maria Esteves.

Paola Corso, was born in Pittsburgh of Italian American anscestry.  She is the author of the poetry collections, Death by Renaissance and A Proper Burial, the short story collection, Giovanna’s 86 Circles, and the novel, Catina’s Haircut.

Sandra Maria Esteves, known as the “Godmother of Nuyorican Poetry,” is a celebrated poet and visual artist who has published several collections of verse.

When & Where

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

11:00 am

Health Sciences Building, Room119

Contact

Professor Louis Parascandola or Professor Maria McGarrity: (718) 488-1050.

Africana-Studies Mentorship Program Event

The Africana Studies Mentorship Program invites you to attend a potentially life-changing lecture on careers with non-profit organizations.

The speaker will be Ingrid Floyd, Director of Iris House in Harlem.

When & Where
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
12 noon - 1 pm
Library Learning Center, Room 122

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact the Humanities Division at 718 488 1053 or contact Professor Carol Allen at carol.allen@liu.edu.

Michael Bokor the 2011 Featured Alumnus of English Department at Illinois State

Professor Michael J.K. Bokor (English Department) has been chosen as the “2011 Featured Alumnus” of the English Department, Illinois State University (ISU). A message from Dr. Joan Mullin (Professor and Chair, English Studies, Illinois State University) said Dr. Bokor was chosen because his “areas of research are very consistent with the direction of the Department” and his perspectives are beneficial to students and faculty.

Among others, Dr. Bokor will return to the ISU campus as their guest this fall and facilitate a Professional Growth workshop on October 14 as well as speak to students and faculty of the English Department on his work and experience so far as an alum. He will also join all the other alumni guests and department representatives to participate in a lunch with the ISU President. 

Read more here.

Congratulations, Professor Bokor!

Jessica Hagedorn Works with Culturestrike

Professor Jessica Hagedorn, Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing (English Department), was in Arizona all last week with a delegation of artists & writers called Culturestrike, an activist group whose goals include:

[advancing] a community-informed, impactful cultural strategy to challenge and displace the dominant anti-migrant narrative by infusing the national narrative with creative values-based, pro-migrant images, ideas, and stories. 

Read more about Culturestrike at their website.

The campaign began with a gathering September 10-16 in Tucson and Phoenix.

Read more here.

And here.

Voices of the Rainbow Event: Eduardo Chirinos

Please join us for the first Voices of the Rainbow reading of the Fall 2011 semester: Eduardo Chirinos.


When & Where

Tuesday, September 27, 2011 

12 pm 

 LLC 124

Eduardo Chirinos, a native of Peru, is the author of several volumes of poetry.  In 2001, he was awarded the Premio Casa de América prize for innovation in Latin American poetry for his volume, Breve historia de la música (A Brief History of Music).  Last year, Chirinos won the GeneraciÓn del 27 prize for Mientras el lobo está (While the Wolf is Around). He will be reading from his work and discussing it with his translator, Gary Racz, from LIU’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literature.

Contact Professors Louis Parascandola or Maria McGarrity: (718) 488-1050.

Funding by the Provost’s Office.

Co-sponsored by Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

Barbara Henning at the Scarab Club (Detroit)

Professor Barbara Henning (English) is reading Tuesday, September 21st in Detroit at the Scarab Club for the Woodward Line Poetry Series.

http://www.whiteprintinc.org/blog/

Bernard Schweizer Heads Rebecca West Society Conference

Professor Bernard Schweizer is running the 5th International Rebecca West Conference, at Baruch College, this Friday and Saturday, Sept. 16-17.

Christine Grausso, a graduate student in the English Department, will be one of the presenters at the conference!


You can get the program online at http://www.rebeccawestsociety.com/.

Faculty Forum (Works in Progress) Events for Fall 2011: Sealy Gilles & Maria McGarrity

The English Department is happy to announce the revival of our Faculty Forum series, which has been on hiatus since 2008.

The Faculty Forum promotes scholarly activity among full-time faculty members in the English Department by providing them with the opportunity to circulate their research among colleagues. Interested faculty then respond to the circulated work over wine and cheese, offering feedback for the work's revision and collegial support towards it publication.

Click here to see a list of past presenters.

Note: Participation in this forum is open only to full-time faculty members in the English Department and is distinct from the Conolly College Faculty Forum.  English-Department graduate students are invited to attend.

For more information about the series, contact Professor Harriet Malinowitz (English Department).

This semester, there will be two Faculty Forum events:

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Sealy Gilles, “Proliferations: Text and Disease in Early Modern London”

Friday, September 16, 2011
3:30-4:30 PM (immediately after the English Department faculty meeting)

The following is Professor Gilles' description of her talk:

Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the restrained, sometimes elliptical treatment of disease in medieval English and continental texts gives way to increasing hyperbole and grotesquerie – often centered on women, sexually suspect men, and foreigners. The shifting dynamics of disease discourse are particularly evident in early modern accounts of Criseyde or Cressida, the treacherous lover of Troilus, prince of Troy. By the seventeenth century, portrayals of Cressida and other sexual deviants draw upon a wide repertoire of invective and vituperation taken from the rhetoric of epidemic diseases, especially those illnesses that write themselves upon the skin.

However, the same lexicon that supplies Thersites in Troilus and Cressida with his stream of abuses is put to a very different use by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas Dekker, the pamphleteer and playwright. In plague pamphlets written during the epidemics of 1603 and 1625, Dekker champions the sick and calls city authorities to account for their abandonment of the poor. His diffuse and extravagant polemics employ the discourse of disease in a very different arena, one in which corporeal disintegration is used to chastise and shame the powerful.

The forum will concentrate on excerpts from late medieval and early modern texts. We will take a look at the urban context that shapes these works and the rhetorical stratagems they employ in the service of emerging political and sexual agendas.

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Maria McGarrity, “The 'Indecent Postures' of Island Cricket: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.”

Friday, November 18, 2011
3:30-4:30 PM (immediately after the English Department faculty meeting)

The following is Professor McGarrity’s description of her talk:

As the first chapter of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man closes, Joyce inscribes a remarkable sporting image on the geography of his island. He writes, “the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl” (59).  Joyce creates a striking image of cricket amid the island as a slight mass of terra firma that is somehow created by and susceptible to incursion from the sea at once.   In a later moment of geographic formation, Joyce connects Ireland’s “islanding” not only to the sea but to its remnants across maritime borders, those “few last figures in distant pools” (151).  Joseph O’Neill’s contemporary account of the Irish Atlantic world as imagined in a displaced, wounded New York post 9/11 rests upon the Irish island imaginary of James Joyce.  O’Neill shows that the very circularity within the Atlantic world represents not simply the imaged geographies of Ireland, of New York, and Trinidad but that all of these locations function as a psychic Netherland and in fact as nether-islands.  All of these locations host cricket matches that question respective island identities.  For Joyce and O’Neill, specifically shape metaphors, allusions, and critical settings of their narratives habitually in terms of the propinquity of the sea on their cricket pitches to highlight the vulnerability of the home island.  Such unlikely geographic affiliations exist not simply within O’Neill’s work but also reach back to a fundamental trope in Irish literature of the sea as a metaphor for history and the island as a wounded geography in Ireland’s globalized imagined community.

Creative-Writing MFA Fall Orientation & Reading by Kaylie Jones

updated: Date Changed

Friday, September 23, 6-8

Spector Lounge, 4th floor, English Department

There will be a reading by Kaylie Jones, visiting writer in the MFA Program for the fall.

A good time for all of us to be together at the same time and to welcome all our new comrades, share our summer adventures, answer any questions, eat, drink, everything -- see you then!

Graduate Reception

The English Department Reception for MA & MFA Graduate Students

Date:          Thursday, September 22, 2011

Time:          5:30-7 PM

Place:         Spector Lounge

The Co-Chairs of the English Department invite you join us in kicking off the new semester!  We will share some pizza, beer, and wine as we introduce ourselves and get to know one another. This is a great time for all to learn about faculty specialties and for faculty to meet and check in with our returning and new graduate students.  English Graduate Alumni are invited to attend.

MFA Blog

The English Department's Creative-Writing MFA Program now has its own blog. Go there for all the latest about MFA-related events and the doings of MFA students and alumni.

Voices of the Rainbow: Fall 2011 Reading Schedule

The following are readings scheduled for the upcoming semester.

Eduardo Chirinos
Tuesday Sept. 27 noon
Library Learning Center, Room 124

Eduardo Chirinos, a native of Peru, is the author of several volumes of poetry. He will be reading from his work and discussing it with his translator, Gary Racz, from LIU’s Foreign Languages Department. Co-sponsored with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS).

Paola Corso & Sandra Maria Esteves
Wednesday Oct. 5, 11 a.m.
Health Sciences Building, Room 119

Paolo Corso, was born in Pittsburgh of Italian American ancestry. She is the author of the poetry collections, Death by Renaissance and A Proper Burial, the short story collection Giovanna’s 86 Circles, and the novel Catina’s Haircut.

Sandra Maria Esteves, known as the “Godmother of Nuyorican Poetry,” is a celebrated poet and visual artist who has published several collections of verse.

Heidi Durrow & Dahlma Llanos Figueroa
Thursday Oct. 13, noon
Library Learning Center, Room 124

Heidi Durrow, of African American and Danish ancestry, is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, winner of numerous awards including the Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change.

Dahlma Llanos Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She is author of the historical novel Daughters of the Stone, a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bigham Fellowship.

Tina Chang
Monday Nov. 14 noon
Humanities Building, Room 210

[This event was originally scheduled for Monday Nov. 7, but it had to be rescheduled due to illness.]

Tina Chang, is author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods and Strangers. Raised in New York City, Tina is the current Brooklyn Poet Laureate.

ALL READINGS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Long Island University: Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues in Brooklyn.

For more information contact Louis Parascandola or Maria McGarrity at 718 488-1050.

Funding provided by the Provost’s Office.

Lewis Warsh Reading

Greenlight Bookstore & Melville House Press present Poetry After 9/11: Ten Years Later

Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY

Wednesday, September 7, 7:30 PM

Featuring poets Miranda Beeson, Star Black, Patricia Spears Jones, Carter Ratcliff, Dennis Nurske, Lewis Warsh.

Introduction by publishers Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians.

Ten years ago this fall, Brooklyn publisher Melville House Press was born out of a desire to collect the poetry that arose everywhere after 9/11 — on telephone poles, on firehouse walls, in the bus shelters, and on the internet, in places like MHP founder Dennis Johnson's blog Moby Lives.

This 10th anniversary edition of the anthology Poetry After 9/11 contains poems by forty-five of some of the most important poets of the day, as well as some of the literary world’s most dynamic young voices, all writing in New York City in the year immediately following the World Trade Center attacks. Greenlight is honored to mark the 10th anniversary of Melville House, and ten years since the events of 9/11 changed our city and our literature, with a reading by the poets featured in the anthology, introduced by the press's pioneering founders.