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  • Visiting Writer: Laura Kasischke

    Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels.  She was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for her collection SPACE, IN CHAINS (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).  She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rilke Award for Poetry, the Bess Hokin Award from POETRY magazine, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She is teaches in the MFA Program and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, from which she graduated.  She lives with her husband and son in Chelsea, Michigan.

    More information: www.laurakasischke.com

  • Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy

    Director/ Producer: Haydn Reiss 

    Beginning in 1994, Reiss has made a series of documentaries on writers and poets, including William Stafford & Robert Bly: A Literary Friendship and the award-winning Rumi: Poet of the Heart, which was narrated by Debra Winger. Both films aired on PBS.

    In 2005, Reiss produced, How Democrats and Progressives Can Win: Solutions from George Lakoff’ Professor Lakoff, a noted expert in linguistics and political language, is showcased in a tightly knit program that explains how modern politics is waged through ideas like “framing” the debate, the way a party’s “values” influence voters and much more. At that time only the political right had made use of these cognitive techniques to gain political power and the film was made in response to that imbalance.

    Reiss’ 2009 film, Every War Has Two Losers, a look at poet William Stafford’s years as a conscientious objector, was a 2011 winner at the Canadian International Film Festival and an official selection of the 2011 United National Film Festival. 

    2015 brought the completion of Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy, the first feature documentary profile of the prolific and controversial poet and activist. Featuring Martin Sheen, Gary Snyder Mark Rylance, Jane Hirshfield, Philip Levine and many others from the world of art and literature. It is set for a PBS broadcast next year. 

    In a previous life Haydn worked as  assistant on the psychological thriller Jacob Ladder and as assistant to the producer Alex Ho on Oliver Stone’s JFK.

    Mr. Reiss has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota Film & TV, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the Westcliff Foundation and others.

    There will be a Q&A with the filmmaker, Haydn Reiss, following the screening. This event is sponsored by the Visiting Writers Series and Jewish Cultural Studies.

  • Visiting Writers: The Breakbeat Poets

    Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture.

    The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.

    The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

  • Visiting Writers: Gerald Stern

    Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.  He is the author of 16 books of poetry, including, most recently, Divine Nothingness (Norton, 2014) and In Beauty Bright (Norton, 2012), as well as This Time:  New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award and a kind-of memoir of a year in 85 sections titled Stealing History, was published by Trinity University Press in the spring of 2012.  Stern was awarded the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets, was the 2010 recipient of the Medal of Honor in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was inducted into the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the 2012 recipient of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.  He was the 2014 winner of the Frost Medal. Stern has two books coming out in 2017, a poetry collection from W. W. Norton called Galaxy Love and a book of non-fiction titled Deathwatch, to be released by Trinity University Press.

  • Visiting Writers: Liz Moore

    Liz Moore is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction.
Her first novel, The Words of Every Song (Broadway Books, 2007), centers on a fictional record company in New York City just after the turn of the millennium. It draws partly on Liz’s own experiences as a musician. It was selected for Borders’ Original Voices program and was given a starred review by Kirkus.Roddy Doyle wrote of it, “This is a remarkable novel, elegant, wise, and beautifully constructed. I loved the book.”

After the publication of her debut novel, Liz obtained her MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. In 2009, she was awarded the University of Pennsylvania’s ArtsEdge residency and moved to Philadelphia, where she still lives. She is now an Assistant Professor of Writing at Holy Family University.

Her second novel, Heft, was published by W.W. Norton in January 2012 to popular and critical acclaim. Of Heft, The New Yorker wrote, “Moore’s characters are lovingly drawn…a truly original voice”; The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Few novelists of recent memory have put our bleak isolation into words as clearly as Liz Moore does in her new novel”; and editor Sara Nelson wrote in O, The Oprah Magazine, “Beautiful…Stunningly sad and heroically hopeful.” The novel was published in five countries, was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was included on several “Best of 2012” lists, including those of NPR and the Apple iBookstore.

Moore’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in venues such as Tin House, The New York Times, and Narrative Magazine. She is the winner of the Medici Book Club Prize and Philadelphia’s Athenaeum Literary Award. After winning a 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she spent 2014-15 at the American Academy in Rome, completing her third novel.

    That novel, The Unseen World, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. in July 2016.

  • Visiting Writers: Colm Toibin

    Colm Toibin is the author of eight novels, including ‘The Master’ and ‘Brooklyn’, and two collections of stories. His play ‘The Testament of Mary’ was nominated for a Tony Award for best play in 2013. He is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.

  • Alicia Ostriker

    Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy (winner of the National Jewish book Award), The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light.  She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has been twice nominated for the National Book Award, among other honors.    As a critic she is the author of Stealing the Language; the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible.  She is distinguished Professor Emerita of Rutgers University, teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program at Drew university, and is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. This event is part of the Jewish Cultural Studies Program.

  • Alena Graedon

    Alena Graedon’s first novel, The Word Exchange, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Paperback Row pick, and selected as a best novel of 2014 by Kirkus. It has been translated into eight languages. She has twice been a MacDowell Colony Fellow
    (2012 and 2017), and has also received fellowships at Yaddo, Ucross, The Virginia Center for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and Jentel. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Book Review, newyorker.com, The Believer magazine, Guernica, and Post Road among other publications. A native of Durham, NC, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s MFA program, and she is an Assistant Professor of English at Monmouth University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  • Eleanor Hooker & Clodagh Beresford Dunne

    Two Irish poets, Eleanor Hooker and Clodagh Beresford Dunne will read from their works. Eleanor Hooker is a poet and writer. In 2013, her debut collection of poetry, The Shadow Owner’s Companion was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award for Best First Irish Collection. In 2016, she published her second collection of poems A Tug of Blue and she was included as one of Poetry Ireland Review’s ‘Rising Generation’ of Irish poets. In February 2016, her flash fiction The Lesson was awarded 1st Prize in the Bare Fiction Flash Fiction competition in the UK. Her poetry has been published in literary journals internationally including: POETRY (Chicago), PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, AGENDA Poetry, The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, The Moth, The Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, Crannóg, POEM: International English Language Quarterly and Cyphers.

    Clodagh Beresford Dunne was the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Emerging-Writer Award Bursary, 2016. Her poems have appeared in Irish and international print and online journals, including Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, Southword, The Moth, The Pickled Body, Spontaneity and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She is the recipient of a number of literature awards from Irish Artlinks, Waterford City and County Arts Office. Born and raised in a regional newspaper family, her writing was first committed to print at age 8. Described by Irish poet Thomas McCarthy as “a writer of great seriousness and purpose,” Beresford Dunne’s poetry has been hailed as “announcing a new vision to us, a new vortex of energy that localises human experience and domesticates genius.”

  • Marlon James

    Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His recent novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean
    Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James lives in Minneapolis.