Undergraduate Courses: Spring 2019

Graduate Courses: Spring 2019

Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award finalist!

Sigrid Nunez, Distinguished Visiting Writer in the Creative Writing MFA program (2015), was announced as one of five finalists for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her novel, The Friend, released earlier this year, has received rave reviews. The New York Times Book Review writes, "Nunez’s prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts—the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence."

The Friend is "[a] moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog."

Nunez joins other finalists Jamel Brinkley, Lauren Groff, Brandon Hobson, and Rebecca Makkai. You can read the full list of finalists for all categories on BuzzFeed Books.

New chapbook from Lisa Rogal + NYC Reading

Lisa Rogal (MFA 2013) has a new chapbook out by Ugly Duckling Presse (where MFA 2014 graduate, Daniel Owen currently works as editor and publicity director) this month! Feed Me Weird Things is described as being "about the importance of the unimportant: the quotidian, the overlooked, the natural world, the pain or beauty of longing, the persistence of uncertainty. With a voice at once irreverent and sincere, the poems enact meaning through attentiveness, ambiguity, and humor."

Karen Weiser writes of the chapbook: "Lisa Rogal’s Feed Me Weird Things is a pleasurable existential crisis. I mean, she asks what is the place of pleasure in the cultural mess we are in, which robs us of (almost) every last bit of possible gratification, or makes pleasure an ominous, dumb thing."

You can read more about the chapbook and buy it from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Lisa will be visiting NYC to give a reading on Thursday October 25th at Greenlight Bookstore (PLG location). You can find more details on UDP or Greenlight Bookstore.

Rosemary Mayer, TEMPORARY MONUMENTS

Long time English department adjunct, Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014), has a posthumous publication out from Soberscove Press. Temporary Monuments: Work By Rosemary Mayer, 1977-1982 "is the first comprehensive presentation of this body of work and includes Mayer’s documentation of these impermanent artworks. Mayer created photographs, writings, artists’ books, and drawings that expand the realm of these projects and reflect her interest in exploring ideas through a variety of media."

You can order the book from the press.

Also, check out a great review on Hyperallergic.

Jacob Matkov: Broken Bells Reading Series

Jacob Matkov (MFA Program Advisor) curates a new event for the Broken Bells reading series taking place on September 9th, 2018, at Local 61 (61 Bergen St in Brooklyn) from 7-9pm.

He will introduce readers Cathy Linh Che, Cynthia Cruz, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, and Jayson P. Smith.

Find more information on the Facebook event page!

Mark Dow: Plain Talk Rising

Former LIU adjunct faculty member and past Downtown Brooklyn contributor Mark Dow has self-published a collection of poems titled Plain Talk Rising, which is available for purchase here. If you would like to request a review copy, please email mdow@igc.org

Congratulations, Mark!

See below for more information:

"Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising hovers above poetry and prose. It also transmutes one into the other, poetry into prose, and then back again, like an alchemist let loose in a writing workshop that may set alight our era of MFA's for good. 'The past, alight, hovers nearby with open eyes.' You will simply have to find your seat in the dark theater without flashlight or usher. Once seated, you will begin to identify with the author seated at his desk, dropping down the words toward the white landing area below. 'Oh and another thing.' (He is talking to you). The words stay there, falling into place when you have closed this unforgettable book, funny and wise."
            --David Rosenberg, author of A Literary Bible and co-author (with Harold Bloom) of The Book of J  

"A truly remarkable and challenging book."
            --Laurence Lieberman, author of The Creole Mephistopheles and Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets

Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising, before being "self-published," was a finalist in the Colorado Prize, New Issues, and Yale Series competitions (selected by Donald Revell, Linda Gregerson, and W.S. Merwin, respectively). It was also a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press.

Dow's poems and nonfiction have appeared in Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Caribbean Review of Books, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, Fascicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Paris Review, PN Review, SLAM! Wrestling, Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and Word for/Word, among many others. His e-chapbook "Feedback" and Other Conversation Poems(2015) is at Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics.

Dow is also author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California, 2004) and co-editor of Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime (Routledge, 2002).

New publication & reading event from Professor Gary Racz

Professor Gary Racz of the Department of English, Philosophy and Languages has work in the new issue of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas “Nuevísimos: New Spanish American Writing” (no. 96, June 2018).

He will participate in the issue launch on Tuesday, October 2, 2018, from 5:00-8:00 p.m, reading his translations!

The event will take place at The City College of New York in the Faculty Dining Room, North Academic Center, 3rd floor. 160 Convent Avenue (@138th Street)

Please send your RSVP to either dshapiro@ccny.cuny.edu or rmartinez@ccny.cuny.edu

You will find more details on the attached flier.

Gary Racz: New Translations

Five play translations by Professor Gary Racz of the Department of English, Philosophy and Languages have appeared in The Golden Age of Spanish Drama: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by UCLA’s Barbara Fuchs: The Siege of Numantia by Miguel de Cervantes; Fuenteovejuna and The Dog in the Manger, both by Félix Lope de Vega; Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Trials of a Noble House by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Earlier versions of Fuenteovejuna and Life Is a Dream were published in The Norton Anthology of Drama, Vol. I (2009). Life Is a Dream first appeared in the Penguin Classics Series in 2006. Fuenteovejuna was similarly published as a stand-alone volume by Yale University Press’s Margellos World Republic of Letters Books in 2010 and was reprinted in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol. C, in 2012.

           

To date, Life Is a Dream has received six stagings:  at LIU Brooklyn’s Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts in 2007; by The Spanish Duke Company at Duke University’s Duke Theater in 2008; by A Festival of Fools in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, in 2010; at Brigham Young University—Idaho’s Snow Black Box Theatre in 2011; at Hampden-Sydney College’s John Auditorium in 2013, and at Elmhurst College’s Mill Theatre in 2018.  Fuenteovejuna was performed as the M.F.A. production by Rogue Shakespeare of Mary Baldwin College at the Blackfriars Playhouse in 2014.  The Siege of Numantia, The Dog in the Manger, and Trials of a Noble House await their premieres in these new translations. By way of preview, here is Segismund, the newly freed heir apparent to the throne of Poland, addressing Rosaura, a lady-in-waiting to Stella, in Act II, scene vii, ll. 1593-1617 of Life Is a Dream: 

    No, say you are the sun, in whose domain

                                    Of fire the stellar bides,

                                    For Stella basks in rays your light provides.

                                    In all the fragrant realm

                                    Of flowers, there’s but one goddess at the helm,

                                    The rose, whom others call

                                    Their empress, being loveliest of all.

                                    I’ve seen the finest stones

                                    Extracted from the earth’s profoundest zones

                                    Revere the diamond’s shine,

                                    Their emperor as brightest in the mine.

                                    At lush courts in the sky

                                    Where stars from teetering republics vie,

                                    I’ve seen fair Venus reign

                                    As queen of all that vast and starred demesne.

                                    Mid perfect spheres I’ve seen

                                    The sun rule lesser orbs, which he’d convene

                                    At court, where he holds sway,

                                    Presiding as the oracle of day.

                                    How could a case arise,

                                    Then, where the planets, stones, and flowers prize

                                    Great beauty, yet yours serves

                                    A lady far less fair?  Your charm deserves

                                    More praise than hers bestows,

                                    Oh bright sun, Venus, diamond, star, and rose!

Patrick Horrigan: Reading in London

Professor Patrick E. Horrigan (English) will read from his new novel, Pennsylvania Station (Lethe Press), on Tuesday, July 24th @ 7:30pm at London's Royal Festival Hall as part of the "Polari" writers' salon hosted by journalist and writer Paul Burston. More details.

To get your copy of the book, click here.