the longest island: August 2015

Downtown Brooklyn #24

The "cover" of Issue #24:
"La Disparition #2" by Lewis Warsh.

For 24 years, Downtown Brooklyn: A Journal of Writing has been the literary magazine of the English Department. We are happy to announce the online publication of our 24th annual issue. We are sad to report, however, that this will be the last issue for the foreseeable future. Please read Wayne Berninger's "From the Editor" note at our main page.

Click here to download Issue #24.

New Book of Poems by Tejan Green & Jeremy Beauregard

Jeremy Beauregard and Tejan Green, both graduates of the English Department's Creative Writing MFA program have published a collection of poetry entitled We Were Us.

The book is "an examination of what is—and what was—through a reflexive lens focused on future, and past, relationships. All roses have died, and, ultimately, the love here is inaccessible. We Were Us is just as unapologetic as it is empathetic."

The book is available in print and Kindle online and is also available directly from the authors.

Charles Matz: New Book, Columbus, the Moor

In his new "Atlantic World epic" from House of Nehisi Publishers, Professor Charles Matz (English) "opens the music of Earth's breast, from Arawakan illusions to cynical jests of a Eurocentric logic of burden." (Jay Haviser) and mercilessly sets us up for the day of "encounter" when Christopher Columbus and "a termite crew" arrive in what would come to be called the New World.

From the publisher's website: "The literary works of Charles Matz are extremely complex...What distinguishes his work is his plunging into the bottomless pit of lasting orality, the long and varied history of poetry-song-ritual."
– Andrea Zanzotto, Italy

Click the book cover above to order.

Undergraduate Courses -- Fall 2015

Don't be late! Register now for Fall 2015!

There are no advanced English courses being offered in Summer 2015.

These course descriptions are provided by the professors teaching the courses.

For more information, write to them directly. Get English Department faculty contact info here.

ENG 126 News Writing (Course ID# 4894)
Professor Jennifer Rauch (Journalism Department)
Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:30-2:55

This course will satisfy a Writing & Rhetoric elective requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Writing & Rhetoric requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Please note that this course is cross-listed with JOU 119. Students who wish this course to count toward the English major (or minor) should be sure to register for ENG 126 — not JOU 119. Contact the Journalism Department for information about the content of this course.

ENG 128 Early British Literatures (Course ID# 5060): Monsters, Shape-shifters, and Outsiders in Early British Literatures

Professor Sealy Gilles

Mondays & Wednesdays 4:30-5:45 PM

This course is required in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy a Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor.

Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of pre-modern England! In 1000 C.E. England was Europe’s far west frontier, an unsettled island of competing fiefdoms and migratory peoples. By 1600 London was the western world’s largest city and Queen Elizabeth I ruled over a colonial power soon to become the British Empire. The early literature of this island nation reflects the multiple identities of the English people, but it is also troubled by an often violent history and by the specter of strange beings, both benign and monstrous. This semester our cast of aliens stars Grendel, the swamp dwelling humanoid, a werewolf, and a giant Green Knight. Outsiders in human form include Chaucer’s gender-bending Pardoner and Shakespeare’s Moor. As we explore the alien in works ranging from Beowulf to Shakespeare’s Othello, you will be asked to write frequently, participate actively, and read closely. You may expect that I will respect your ideas and respond quickly and fairly to your work.

ENG 158 Early Literatures of the U.S. (Course ID# 4099)

Professor Leah Dilworth
Mondays 6-8:30 PM

In this course, we will explore American literature from the colonial period to the Civil War through the theme of freedom and oppression. Freedom from oppression has been at the heart of American cultural and political identity since at least the 17th Century, even though the colonial and early national economies relied, to varying degrees, on slave labor. This contradiction fueled the Protestant literature of the New England colonies, Revolutionary political discourse, the movement for women’s rights, and the movement to abolish slavery. We will explore how American writers and artists negotiated these contradictions as they formed new, distinctive American voices. Readings will include works by William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Handsome Lake, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.

ENG 164 Explorations in Creative Writing (Course ID# 4945)

Professor Lewis Warsh
Wednesdays 6-8:30 PM

This course is required in the Creative Writing concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Creative Writing requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Any student may take this course a second time for credit.

The goal of the workshop is to expand our ideas of “what is a poem” and “what is a work of fiction.” Are poetry and fiction exclusive or related genres? Weekly assignments will question preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the best ways of transcribing thought processes and experiences into writing. We will also attempt to engage the present moment--the issues of our time, if any, that influence our writing. Is it possible to write in a vacuum while ignoring the rest of the world? What is the writer's responsibility? Can writing change the world? We will read as models the work of William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Frank O'Hara, Andre Breton, Lydia Davis, Gertrude Stein, Ted Berrigan, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Wang Ping, Roberto Bolaño and Ernest Hemingway, among many others. Much of the workshop time will be spent reading and discussing each other's writing.

ENG 165 Poetry Workshop (Course ID# 4136): Spirit & Dream Autobiographies In Poetry (Who Were You Then, Who Are You Now?)

Professor John High
Tuesdays & Thursdays 3-4:15 PM

This course will satisfy a Creative Writing elective requirement in the Creative Writing concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Creative Writing requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. English majors concentrating in Creative Writing may take this course a second time for credit.

In this course we will begin to sculpt our poetic writings into the language of spirit and dream autobiographies. Humanity's attempt to understand itself throughout the ages has often resulted in a fringe of writing engaged in a poetry of quest, prophecy, vision, verbal experimentation, and meditative stories that express the changes of self in the world. In your own writing quest, your discoveries may tread between the realms of journey, dream, fictional autobiography, haiku, and traditional verse, while leading you to a deeper sense of awareness and awe of the secret depths of human character and verbal expression. Poetic autobiographies may include stories and poetic prose; indeed, language itself can only help guide and gauge a spiritual journey, but through language we discover and present the shifting and mysterious points of our identities and the worlds around us.

In this workshop we will have a chance to glimpse one another's strengths and weaknesses in writing and to offer suggestions as to how to improve and build on our true intentions in the work. We will touch upon the themes of parallel worlds and quantum leaps of imagination: who were you then, and who are you now? The readings will also include the study of Wabi Sabi (the beauty of imperfection). We will set out to understand the "strivings" of each piece of writing in order to determine the ways in which it can be structured and developed into a whole and, afterwards, offer constructive criticism and helpful suggestions to the author. There will be class discussions on what we mean when we talk about the autobiography as a gathering ground for material evolving out of the imagination's eye and the worlds it inhabits in dream as well as reality; concurrently, there will be readings and class discussions on the nature of memory, improvisation, and persona. We will scrutinize the craft of the pieces and explore how we might more effectively implement, extend, and develop the techniques and forms of these poems in our own evolving work. The goal of the course includes completion of a chapbook of writing and culminates in a group reading and party at semester’s end.

We’ll be reading Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Andrew Juniper’s Wabi Sabi—The Japanese Art of Impermanence, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, and a collection of writings ranging from Emily Dickinson to bell hooks.

ENG 169 Non-Western or Post-Colonial Literature (Course ID# 6060): The Black Atlantic

Professor Jonathan Haynes
Mondays & Wednesdays 3-4:15 PM

The African diaspora was not a simple matter of Africans being transported to the New World as slaves. “The Black Atlantic” names the dense networks built up over the centuries as Black people crisscrossed the ocean in all directions, maintaining connections between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. This matrix gave birth to rich transnational cultures and to various conceptions of pan-Africanism. We will consider the facts of the matter, the histories of slavery, black sailors, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and labor migrants. We will follow African deities and symbols—Mami Wata, Elegba, the Sankofa bird—to the New World. Film, the visual arts, and music will come into the story, but we will be principally concerned with how this inspiring if often painful history has been represented and interpreted by writers from Olaudah Equiano to Chimamanda Adichie.

ENG 170 Literary Periods & Movements (Course ID# 6059): Harlem Renaissance

Professor Carol Allen
Thursdays 6-8:30 PM

Due to under-enrollment, this course was converted to tutorial format (one-on-one with Professor Allen).

This course will satisfy the Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Any student may take ENG 140, 150, 170 or 180 a second time for credit.

This course will feature the major and minor voices of the Harlem Renaissance. We will study the philosophies of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B DuBois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey and Zora Neale Hurston and read works by them along with texts (novels, stories, poems, plays and hybrid works) from Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Marita Bonner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, and others. Attention will also be given to art and music from the period. Skills to be strengthened include: close reading, writing with revision, research, analysis, and using texts to spark your own creative output. Assignments will include a informal writing, in-class writing, leading class discussion, and a research paper or creative response with research and metatext.

ENG 171 Introduction to Classical Rhetoric (Course ID# 5513)

Professor John Killoran
Tuesdays 6-8:30 PM

Due to under-enrollment, this course was converted to tutorial format (one-on-one with Professor Killoran).

This course will satisfy a Writing & Rhetoric elective requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Writing & Rhetoric requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. Note: This course is designed not only for English majors and minors but also for students from disciplines such as Education, Business, Political Science, Journalism, and Media Arts who seek to develop their skills as critical readers, persuasive writers, and engaged citizens.

Students have been studying classical rhetoric for more than 2400 years, starting with the ancient Greeks, so why study it in 2015? Classical rhetoric offers us guidelines for how to be persuasive. In ancient times, rhetoric played a key role in the birth of our traditions of democratic politics and law. In modern times, classical rhetoric has been revived to guide us in analyzing the persuasive messages around us and to make our own writing more persuasive.

In this course, students will learn concepts from classical rhetoric and apply them to analyze contemporary writing, speaking, and multimedia communication in . . .

politics and law;
advertising, marketing, and public relations;
traditional media and new digital media;
our personal lives and communities.

By the end of the course, students will better recognize how language persuades us of what we believe and whom we believe. Students will also have developed their sensitivity to the power in others’ use of language and will become more empowered in their own use of language.

ENG 174 Teaching Writing (Course ID# 6061)

Professor Donald McCrary
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:30-5:45 PM

This course will satisfy a Writing & Rhetoric elective requirement in the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. It can satisfy the Writing & Rhetoric requirement in either the Literature concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be applied toward the English minor. English majors concentrating in Writing & Rhetoric may take this course a second time for credit.

The course will examine theories and practices of the teaching of writing for both college and high school instructors. The course will explore theoretical and pedagogical issues of writing instruction such as invention, process, curriculum design, literacy, conferencing, and development. Theories and practices regarding the integration of reading and writing in the writing classroom will be a significant focus. The course will discuss important contemporary issues such as ELL learners, multi-modal instruction and texts, the Common Core, and the academic essay. In the course, students will read and discuss the works of prominent composition and reading theorists such as Louise Rosenblatt, David Bartholomae, Lisa Delpit, and Cynthia L. Selfe.

FOR ENGLISH MAJORS (AND MINORS)
IN THE HONORS PROGRAM—

The following Honors electives (taught by members of the English Department faculty) may be applied to the English minor or major. Any of the following will satisfy the Literature requirement in either the Creative Writing concentration or the Writing & Rhetoric concentration. Any of the following can also satisfy a general English elective requirement in the Literature concentration. Any of the following could also be applied toward the English minor. Please discuss your situation with Wayne Berninger in the English Department before you register.

HHE 116 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6082)

Professor Louis Parascandola Mondays 6-8:30 PM

HHE 117 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6083)

Professor Srividhya Swaminathan Wednesdays 3-5:30 PM

HHE 118 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6084)

Professor John High Thursdays 6-8:30

HHE 119 Advanced Elective Seminar (Class ID# 6085), Professor Andrea Libin Wednesdays 6-8:30 PM

Voices of the Rainbow: Celebrating the Oral Tradition

Since 1993, the English Department at LIU Brooklyn has hosted this series of over 300 poetry and fiction readings by both established writers and emerging talents, from Brooklyn and around the world. These have included a Nobel Prize winner (Derek Walcott) and several Pulitzer Prize winners (Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Muldoon, Junot Diaz, Tracy K. Smith, Gregory Pardlo) as well as many other well-renowned writers (see scrolling list of past readings at the bottom of this page).

Each event in the series has welcomed at least one full LIU Brooklyn class to the audience, but audience size at our events has averaged over 50 listeners and sometimes even exceeded 100. For a time, the series also hosted readings for students and faculty at LIU Brooklyn's now-shuttered extension campus sites in Bushwick and East New York. All readings have been free and open to the public. Over the series' quarter century run, the writers we've welcomed to campus have shared work with thousands of LIU students as well as guests from the surrounding community.

Largely funded by the Provost's Office and the Office of the Dean of Conolly College, events have been presented in collaboration with other departments and programs, including the Department of Teaching and Learning, the Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, the Creative Writing MFA Program, Honors College, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Gender Studies Program. The series has also received funding support from NYSCA.

Unfortunately, reduced funding support and delayed payment by the university of stipends to the writers have made it harder and harder in recent years to keep the series going.

As a result, in Spring 2018, after 25 wonderful years, we will be co-sponsoring our final reading, by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa.

Watch The Longest Island for information about the next event. You will also find Voices of the Rainbow events listed in the calendar on our LibraryThing venue page.

Back to Clubs & Events page.

Starting From Paumanok (English Department Lecture Series on American Literature & Culture)

Photo (taken c. 1901) courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images.
Image from page 41 of Unique Long Island (camera sketches). No known copyright restrictions.

Starting from Paumanok, a series of annual lectures on American literature and culture, was inaugurated by the English Department at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus in 1983. By naming the series after Walt Whitman's great poem (which invokes the Algonkian name for Long Island), the English Department acknowledges Long Island University's geographic and cultural connection with one of Brooklyn's (and Long Island's) foremost literary figures.

Watch The Longest Island for announcements about the next lecture. You will also find the Paumanok listed in the calendar on our LibraryThing venue page.

The faculty of the English Department would like to thank the Mellon Foundation and Long Island University's John P. McGrath fund, which have made a significant and ongoing commitment to the series. We are also grateful to the History Department, the Honors Program, the English Department's Voices of the Rainbow Series, and the Gender Studies Program, which have also generously provided funding for the series over the years.

Back to Clubs & Events page.

LIST OF PAST LECTURES

Claudia Rankine
March 7, 2017

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; and numerous video collaborations. She is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. For Citizen, Rankine won the Forward Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (Citizen was also nominated in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. A finalist for the National Book Award, Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

Sandra Cisneros
October 6, 2015

Sandra Cisneros is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street, and the story collection, Woman Hollering Creek. In addition to other novels and short stories, she has published collections of poetry, essays, and, most recently, a memoir, A House of My Own. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Cisneros is the founder of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral and Macondo Foundations, which serve creative writers.

Gary Shteyngart
February 9, 2015

Russian American writer Gary Shteyngart is the author of the highly praised and best selling works Little Failure (a memoir) and three novels Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante's Handbook. All of these writings, poignantly and with an abundance of humor, discuss the author's experiences as an immigrant learning his ways in America.

Edwidge Danticat

February 25, 2014

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and immigrated to Brooklyn when she was twelve. She has written numerous novels, short story collections, and non-fiction books. Her most recent novel is Claire of the Sea Light. She is the winner of many prizes including the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant. This event was co-funded by the John McGrath Fund, the Mellon Fund, LIU Brooklyn’s English Department, Voices of the Rainbow, Gender Studies Program, LACS, and the Africana Studies Program.

Tracy K. Smith
2013 (February 5)

This bio was current at the time of the event. Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. The collection draws on sources as disparate as Arthur C. Clarke and David Bowie, and is in part an elegiac tribute to her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. Duende (2007) won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body's Question (2003) was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005. After her undergraduate work at Harvard, Smith earned her MFA at Columbia before going on to be a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University, and has also taught at Columbia, City University of New York, and the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Brooklyn.

Alison Bechdel
2012 (February 23)

This bio was current at the time of the lecture. For twenty-five years, Alison Bechdel, internationally-acclaimed lesbian cartoonist, wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a chronicle considered “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” (Ms.). She is also the author of the best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which won an Eisner Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Time Magazine namedFun Home the number one Best Book of 2006, declaring, "The unlikeliest literary success of 2006 is a stunning memoir about a girl growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad and slowly realizing that a) she is gay and b) he is too….This is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For have been translated into many languages, and Bechdel, who lives in Vermont, has an ardent international following. She has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta, and her work is widely anthologized.

2011 (March 10)

Ha Jin

This bio was current at the time of the lecture. Ha Jin, born in China, is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. He was a member of the People’s Liberation Army before coming to the United States in 1986.

He is the author of A Good Fall (about the Chinese immigrant experience in America),Waiting (Winner of a Nation Book Award and based on his five-year service in the communist Chinese Army), and War Trash (winner of a PEN Faulkner Award).

He is currently a Professor of English at Boston University.

2010 (February 24)
Lynn Nottage

This bio was current at the time of the lecture. Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning playRuined has also received an OBIE, the Lucille Lortel Award, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play (Manhattan Theatre Club, Goodman Theatre). Other plays include Intimate Apparel (New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play; Roundabout Theatre, CENTERSTAGE, South Coast Repertory);Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award; Playwrights Horizons, London’s Tricycle Theatre); Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por’knockers and POOF!

Nottage is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2007 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” the National Black Theatre Festival’s August Wilson Playwriting Award, the 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Award for Drama, the 2005 Guggenheim Grant for Playwriting, as well as fellowships from the Lucille Lortel Foundation, Manhattan Theatre Club, New Dramatists and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Her most recent publications include: Ruined (TCG), Intimate Apparel and Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine: Two Plays(TCG) and Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Other Plays (TCG). She is a member of The Dramatists Guild, an alumna of New Dramatists and a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, where she is a visiting lecturer. www.lynnnottage.net.

2008 (October 2)
Walter Mosley

This bio was current at the time of the lecture. Walter Mosely is the author of twenty-nine critically acclaimed books which have been translated into twenty-one languages. His popular mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins began with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. Others in the series include A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty, and A Little Yellow Dog (both of which were New York Times bestsellers). Recently, Easy Rawlins has returned in Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Six Easy Pieces, Little Scarlet and Cinnamon Kiss, a 2006 New York Timesbestseller.

Mosley has written five works of literary fiction: RL's Dream; Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned; Walkin' the Dog; The Man in My Basement and Fortunate Son; three works of science fiction, Blue Light, Futureland and The Wave; and four works of nonfiction, Workin' on the Chain Gang, What Next, Life out of Context, and This Year You Write Your Novel. Two movies have been made from his work: Devil in A Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington and Always Outnumbered, starring Laurence Fishburne.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Grammy Award, the O'Henry Award, the Sundance Institute Risktaker Award for his creative and activist efforts, and the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America.
Mosley created, along with The City College, a new Publishing Degree Program aimed at young urban residents. It is the only such program in the country. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he now lives in Brooklyn.

2008 (April 15)
Yvonne Seon
"The Importance of Africana Studies Programs"

This bio was current at the time of the lecture. Dr. Yvonne Seon is a renowned and respected innovator and administrator of Africana studies programs. She earned a B.A. degree from Allegheny University and an M.A. degree in American government and politics as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at American University. After living and working in the Congo shortly after its independence in 1961, Dr. Seon continued her studies at Union Institute, where she earned perhaps the first doctorate in African and African-American studies, a program she helped design. Dr. Seon is the founding director of the Bolinga Black Cultural Resources Center at Wright State University, where she returned in 2005 to serve as Distinguished Visiting Director. She was again appointed to direct the program in 2006, the same year she retired as Professor of African-American Studies in the History Department at Prince George’s Community College, Largo, Maryland. Dr. Seon has also taught black studies at University of Maryland at College Park, Wilberforce University, and Howard University. While raising three children, she earned an M.Div. from Howard University Divinity School and was the first African-American woman ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister. Deeply committed to others, Dr. Seon is on the Board of Directors of Africare, a private voluntary organization specializing in African development. She recently wroteTotem Games, a poetic exploration of her search for African identity.

2007
Colson Whitehead
"Becoming a New York Writer"

The following bio was current at the time of the lecture. Colson Whitehead's first novel The Intuitionist won the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway. The book concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors in a major metropolis. John Henry Days, an investigation of the legendary folk hero, came out in 2001 and won the Young Lions Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Colossus of New York is a collection of impressionistic essays about the city. The question was, "What makes this place tick?" It was published in 2003. Whitehead's writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Granta, Harper's and Salon. He has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Whiting Award. The novel Apex Hides the Hurt concerns identity, history, and the adhesive bandage industry.

2006
Tom Kerr
"Prison U: How the Late Tookie Williams and Other Incarcerated Writers are Teaching Us"

The following bio was current at the time of Tom Kerr's lecture. Formerly Director of Writing at L.I.U.'s Brooklyn Campus, Tom Kerr is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College. He was active in the media campaign to win clemency for Tookie Williams and is currently shopping Steve Champion's San Quentin death row memoir, One Day Deep: Meditations on Death Row, which he and a former student have edited over the last three years. Tom believes America's incarcerated writers, published and unpublished, have much to teach us. His commentaries have appeared in the online edition ofCounterpunch, the Syracuse Peace Council Newsletter, and various newspapers.

2005
Andrew Ross
"Mental Labor, Mental Property"

2004
Ed Bullins
"The Work of a Black Playwright"

2003
Barbara Foley
"The Radical Origins of the Harlem Renaissance"

2002
Nellie McKay
"African American Women Writers: Legacy & Influence on American Literature"

2001
Edward Said
"American Humanism"

2000
Paul Lauter
"Civil Rights and Literary Study"

1999
Nell Irvin Painter
"Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol"

1998
Deborah McDowell
"Viewing the Remains: Black Funerals/Black Families in Contemporary Photojournalism"

1996
Ann Douglas
"Finding Mongrel Manhattan of the 1920s"

1995
bell hooks
"Ending Racism: Building Community"

1992
Arnold Rampersad
"Black Writers and the Religions of India"

1991
Houston A. Baker, Jr.
"Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s"

1990
Carole Boyce Davies
"The Voices of Others: Black Women's Writing, Third World Politics, and Feminist Discourses"

1989
Alfred Kazin
"A Creative Town: Foreign Artists and Writers in New York"

1988
Vivian Gornick
"Willa Cather and the American Vision"

1987
Elizabeth Hardwick
[Lecturing on Gertrude Stein]

1985
Denis Donoghue
"America in Theory"

1984
Irving Howe
"Work in American Literature"

1983
Justin Kaplan
“…And from Hannibal: Whitman and Mark Twain”