“An Evening with Andrei Codrescu: From Transylvania to New Orleans—A Poet’s Journey”

Codrescu will discuss the politics and culture(s) of East and West, the collapse of communism (which he covered for the U.S. media) and its aftermath, and the historical and literary changes that are reshaping Eastern Europe and informing his own relations to spaces of origin or adoption. He will talk about what it means to live simultaneously in several worlds, both chronologically and biographically, and what political sense this nomadism makes (or doesn’t). His talk will draw on his memoir, “The Hole in the Flag: an Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution,” and recent play, “Ghidul Copilariei Retrocedate” (“Guide to a Recovered Childhood”), which premiered recently at the International Theater Festival in Sibiu, Romania, his birthplace. 

March 23, 2010, 4:30 pm

Wilson Auditorium 

Andrei Codrescu will be reading from his new book, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton University Press, 2010). Book description (Princeton UP) The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a “typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik”–one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to The Tools of Poetry (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and The Ten Muses of Poetry (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating… ), and assigns each of them a tutelary “Ghost-Companion” poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn’t actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs’s funeral procession stopped at McDonald’s, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

Jennifer Grotz’s second book of poems, The Needle, is forthcoming in Spring 2011. Her first book of poems, Cusp, was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Bakeless Prize and also received the Natalie Ornish Best First Book Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems, essays and translations from both the French and Polish appear widely in journals such as New England Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, and in anthologies such as Best American Poetry and Legitimate Dangers. She teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester and also serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of three collections of poetry, This Strange Land(Alice James Books, April 2011), Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). A fourth book, New & Selected Poems, will be published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press in 2012. Her poems have been widely published in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel, have been reprinted in textbooks and anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and world literatures, and have been translated into Spanish and Romanian. Her personal essays appear in The Antioch Review, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, individual artist grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, and has been a Cave Canem Fellow and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Nick Flynn is the author of two memoirs, The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (Norton, 2010) and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir and has been translated into 13 languages. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is currently being made into a film, entitled Welcome to Suck City, starring Robert DeNiro as Flynn’s father, due for release in 2011. Flynn is also the author of three books of poetry, The Captain Asks For a Show of Hands(Graywolf, 2011), Some Ether(Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. His poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review.

Michael Waters’ ten books of poetry include Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize)—these titles from BOA Editions—Bountiful(1992); The Burden Lifters (1989); and Anniversary of the Air(1985)—these titles from Carnegie Mellon UP. In 2011, Shoestring Press (UK) published Selected Poems. His co-edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, he has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Rolling Stone, and The Pushcart Prize,and has chaired the Poetry Panel for the National Book Award. Waters is Professor of English at Monmouth University.

Club Rooms 107-108, Magill Commons

Liliana Ursu, internationally acclaimed Romanian poet, was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1949. Ursu has published eight books of poetry in Romanian. Her first book in English,The Sky Behind the Forest(Bloodaxe Books, 1997), translated by Ursu, Adam J. Sorkin, and Tess Gallagher, became a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for Oxford’s Weidenfeld Prize.Goldsmith Market (Zephyr Press, 2004) is Liliana Ursu’s third book of poetry in Romanian, and her third book to appear in English. Lightwall will be published by Zephyr Press in 2009. Her most recent book A Path to the Sea was published in 2011

During 1992-93 and again in 1997-98, Ursu was a Fulbright Lecturer at Penn State’s University Park campus; in spring 2000 she served as a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville. In fall 2003, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry, Bucknell University. Ursu has worked for Romanian National Radio since 1980, producing a literary magazine of the air.

The reading is sponsored by Global Initiatives and The Visiting Writers Series

Natasha Trethewey is author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press); Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). Her collection Thrall is due for publication in 2012. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.