Keene is Reading William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

In the Spring of 2013 the Department of Theatre and Dance will be producing Shakespeare’s late romance, The Tempest, one of his most important and controversial plays.  The campus community will prepare for this with special events including speakers, discussions, readings,  and more throughout the 2012-13 academic year.  

For more information, or to suggest events related to this year’s text, please contact William Stroup of the English Department as wstroup@keene.edu or MS 1402.

Creative Writing Day 2012

The annual Creative Writing Day Reading will occur on Thursday, April 26 at 6 PM in the Thorne-Sagendorf Conference Room.  Twenty-two students completing writing minors or majors will read brief selections of their work. Please come and cheer for these hard-writing students.

Expanded Rooms, Unbridled Tongues: International Women’s Writing in the 21st Century

Keene State College is hosting a one-day symposium on Friday March 21st, “Expanded Rooms, Unbridled Tongues: International Women’s Writing in the 21st Century.” The symposium has been organized by a planning committee led by assistant professor of English, Carol Bailey.

The opening keynote, “Caribbean Women Writing: Facebook, Spirituality and the Arts of Solitude” will be delivered by professor Curdella Forbes, a novelist and professor at Howard University at 9 a.m. There will then be a morning panel, ” Global Roots and Routes: Contemporary Women’s Writing” at 10:30 a.m. featuring Dr. Karen Cardozo (Research Associate, Five Colleges, Inc.) and professor Soyica Diggs-Colbert (Dartmouth College/Brown University), professor Lynda Pickbourn (Ecomomics, Keene State College) and Ms. Kelsey Hardy (English major, Keene State College).

 

The afternoon session, “Teaching and Learning Round Table: Women’s Writing, Foreign Cultures, and the U.S. College Classroom” will include Ms. Kristian Sullivan (Student, Keene State College), professor Anne-Marie Mallon (English, Women and Gender Studies, Keene State College), professor Rhonda Cobham-Sander (Amherst College), professor Rachel Mordecai (UMass Amherst) and professor Shoba Raj-Gopal (Westfield State University). The closing keynote address, “Feminist Ethnography is Not a Luxury,” will be delivered by professor Keisha-Khan Perry (Brown University).

All of the events are free and open to the public and will be held in Centennial Hall in the Keene State College Alumni Center

The 2012 Janet Grayson and Mason Library Lecture in Literary Studies
Thursday April 19, Centennial Hall, Alumni Center, 4:00-6 PM

This year the Janet Grayson Lecture in Literary Studies will join with the Mason Library Lecture to celebrate the Modern Poetry Archive. The speaker for this year’s event will be Charles Simic.

Charles Simic is former Poet Laureate of the United States. His most recent publications include the book of poems, Master of Disguises (2010), and The Renegade: Writings on Poetry and a Few Other things (2009). Simic has also published numerous translations of poets from former Yugoslavia, including Ivan Lalic, Vasko Popa, Tomaz Salamun and Aleksandar Ristovic. A former professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, Simic’s poetry, prose and translations have been recognized with the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his translations, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

 

The Janet Grayson Lecture in Literary Studies, now in its tenth year, is named in honor of Dr. Janet Grayson, who retired from Keene State’s Department of English in 2003. Previous Grayson lecturers include these distinguished scholars:

2011 J. Michael Dash, “Agronomists, Journalists, Artists: The Work of the Haitian Writer Today”
2010 Michael Ferber, “On Poetic Fame: Is Immortality Dead?”
2009 Lauret Savoy, “Alien Land Ethic: The Distance Between”
2008 Christopher Bigsby, “How Jewish Is He? Arthur Miller and the Holocaust” (cosponsored with the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies)
2007 Douglas Lanier, “Jazzing Up Shakespeare”
2006 Dympna Callaghan, “Art and Life: Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors”
2005 Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare in Life”
2004 Arthur F. Kinney, “King Lear’s Map”
2003 Janet Grayson, “Shakespeare’s ‘Subtle Knot’”

Modern Poetry Collection at Keene State College

The summer of 2011 marked an important addition to the resources for English majors at Keene State College. Under the guidance of the College Archivist, Rodney O’Bien, the Mason Library received three significant gifts to establish a Modern Poetry Archive. The first was a bequest of a 2100-volume modern-poetry library from the family of Frank C. Shuffelton. Shuffelton, a long-time summer resident of Harrisville, New Hampshire, was the chair of the English department at the University of Rochester. The Shuffelton collection includes first and rare editions of works by John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, William Carlos Williams, and many other poets. The College also acquired the editorial and publishing records of Zephyr Press (Brookline, Massachusetts) and Aspect Magazine from the 1960s to 1997. Zephyr Press is best known for publishing the works of the major Eastern European and Chinese poets.

“Aspect Magazine was a prominent Boston poetry journal of the 1970s and 1980s,” said poet and KSC English Professor William Doreski. “Many well-known poets appeared there. Zephyr Press grew out of Aspect. It has published a great deal of poetry translated from Russian and Chinese, including the only English edition of Anna Akhmatova’s complete poetry. Aspect and Zephyr brought together important American and Russian poets, and it continues to publish significant important work. … While I haven’t seen the archive, I expect it to contain a great deal of material for those interested modern and contemporary American, Russian, and Chinese poetry and their various intersections.”

Prof. Doreski also explained that, “aside from the academic scene, which incubated quite a lot of poetry and literary scholarship, the street poetry scene (some of it inspired by John Wieners, one of the last genuine beats) developed a lot of innovation in the poetry world. Aspect, along with Arion’s Dolphin, Ploughshares, and Agni Review, was one of the main outlets for a whole lot of literary activity. Poets who grew up in or were affected (afflicted?) by this scene include Charles Simic, Maxine Kumin, James Tate, Tom Lux, Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, Ron Slate (editor of Chowder Review), Gail Mazur, Sam Cornish, lloyd Schwartz, and many others. This group includes several national poet laureates, many Pulitzer prizes and National Book Awards, etc. The 70s was a particularly hot time for the Boston poetry scene, and Aspect was there to catch it.”

The collection also includes the papers and works of the Monadnock Pastoral Poets—a group led by Rodger Martin, an adjunct faculty member in the KSC Journalism Department and editor of the poetry journal, Worcester Review. The Monadnock Pastoral Poets include Jim Beschta, Pat Fargnoli (former NH Poet Laureate), Terry Farish, John Hodgen, Adelle Leiblein, and Susan Roney-O’Brien. You can see samples of their work on the group’s website.

Adjunct Faculty Reading

Seven adjunct faculty members-including Tracy Botting, Jack Bouley, Lorianne DiSabato Jack Hitchner, Rodger Martin, Ellen Moynihan, and Jeff Friedman-will read their poems, essays and stories on Wednesday, February 29th at 4 p.m. The reading will take place in the Mountainview Room of the Young Student Center. Please come and bring your students. Questions about the reading my be directed to Jeff Friedman at jfriedman1@keene.edu.

Tom Hazuka to visit Keene State College

Tom Hazuka has published three novels, The Road to the Island, In the City of the Disappeared, and Last Chance for First, as well as a book of nonfiction, A Method to March Madness: An Insider’s Look at the Final Four (co-written with C.J. Jones).  He has co-edited five anthologies of short stories: Flash Fiction (W.W. Norton); Sudden Flash Youth (Persea Books); You Have Time for This (Ooligan Press); A Celestial Omnibus: Short Fiction on Faith (Beacon Press); and Best American Flash Fiction of the 21st Century (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).  He is currently editing a new anthology, Flash Fiction Funny.  His short stories, essays and poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, anthologies, and books on the craft of writing fiction.  He recently completed Exile in Gringolandia, a memoir of his experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, and his return to Chile after more than two decades away.  Hazuka teaches fiction writing at Central Connecticut State University.

The 2011 Janet Grayson Lecture in Literary Studies
Monday April 11, Mountain View Room, 4:30-6 PM

The 2011 Janet Grayson Lecture in Literary Studies will be presented by professor J. Michael Dash, professor of French at New York University. The lecture, “Agronomists, Journalists, Artists: The Work of the Haitian Writer Today,” will look at contemporary Haitian writing in the light of the usefulness of art in a time of catastrophe.

Born in Trinidad, professor Dash has worked extensively on Haitian literature and French Caribbean writers, especially Edouard Glissant, whose works, The Ripening (1985), Caribbean Discourse (1989) and Monsieur Toussaint (2005) he has translated into English. After twenty-one years at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica where he was professor of Francophone Literature and Chair of Modern Languages, he is now Professor of French at New York University after having been Director of the Africana Studies Program. His publications include Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Edouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998). He has also translated The Drifting of Spirits (1999) by Gisèle Pineau.  His most recent books are, Libeté: A Haiti Anthology (1999) with Charles Arthur and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001). He is at present completing a book on the Francophone Caribbean in the 1940s.

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The English Department’s Third Tuesday Series Presents “Shaping Writing Cultures and Pedagogies Through Extracurricular Innovation: A Historical Study of a Summer Writers’ Conference.”

 

Dr. Kate Tirabassi will share stories of a regional connection among New England writers and writing teachers in the 1940s, developed at a nationally known summer writers’ conference held at the University of New Hampshire. She will discuss how beliefs about writing spread from one institutional context to multiple curricular and extracurricular sites through the efforts of these teachers and discuss how studying local archives and regional connections among writing instructors can be a means of understanding geographical influences on writing theory and pedagogy.

Appian Way Conference Room, Tuesday March 22, 12:30-1:30

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The English Department presents a reading by Lisa Gill, Monday, February 21 at 6 PM in the Night Owl Café

Lisa Gill received her MFA from the University of New Mexico and has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her books include, Red as a Lotus: Letters to a Dead Trappist (La Alameda Press, 2002), Mortar & Pestle (New Rivers Press, 2006); Dark Enough (La Alameda Press, 2009); The Relenting (New Rivers Press, 2010), and Caput Nili: How I Won the War & Lost My Taste For Oranges (Burning Books).

 

 

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The English Department’s Third Tuesday Series presents Dr. Kirsti Sandy, “My Life in Semesters:  From Blog to Book”

Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 1-2 in the Appian Way Conference Room, Mason Library

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The English Department and the American Studies Program presents Jeffrey Renard Allen

On Thursday October 28 Chicago  poet and writer Jeffery Renard Allen reads at 4pm in the Thorne Conference Room, Thorne-Sagendorph Gallery, Keene State College.

Professor Allen will read from his orignial poetry and fiction, which explore questions space, space & identity through their engagement with African American experience.

Allen’s  poetry, Harbors and Spirits (1999) & Stellar Places (2008), along with his fiction, Rails Under My Back (20010) and Holding Pattern (2007) have distinguished his voice among contemporary African American writers. He is the 2010 recipient of the Ernest J. Gaines Award.

The English Department’s Third Tuesday Series presents Dr. Carol Bailey, “They say my grandmother was a murderer”: Memory, Trauma, and the Power of stories in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable

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Intersections between Race, Power, Science and Ethics

A panel discussion about the Keene is Reading book, The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks featuring Karen Cangialosi (Biology), Dottie Morris, (Diversity), Mia Hulslander (Women’s Studies Student) facilitated by, Patricia Pedroza (Women’s Studies)

Wednesday, 6 October, 12-1 in the Madison Street Lounge

The English Department’s Third Tuesday Series presents Dr. William Stroup, “My Portrait, When I Was 27″:  New Documents in the Keats and Shelley Circle

Dr. Stroup will discuss a letter from Joseph Severn (an English painter best known as the deathbed companion of the poet John Keats) to the American publisher James Fields heretofore unknown to scholars of the Keats and Shelley circle.  The letter, accompanied by this previously unreproduced image of Severn, is laid into a copy of Shelley’s poetry that had been owned by Leigh Hunt and is now in the Rauner Special Collections Library of Dartmouth College.  Dr. Stroup will discuss how these rare documents came together and the implications of this discovery for studies of the historical reception of Keats and Shelley.

Tuesday, September 28^th, 2010, 12-1pm, Appian Way Conference Room, Mason Library, Keene State College.

The 2010 Janet Grayson Lecture in Literary Studies

“I have finished a monument
more lasting than bronze, more
lofty than the regal structure of
the pyramids, one which neither
corroding rain nor the ungovernable
North Wind can ever destroy, nor
the countless series of the years, not
the flight of time. I shall not wholly
die, and a large part of me will
elude the Goddess of Death.”

- Horace (65 – 8 B.C.E.)

Is immortality dead? Dr. Michael Ferber, Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire, will explore the poetic idea of achieving eternal fame through literature in the 2010 Janet Grayson Lecture in Literary Studies. His lecture, entitled “On Poetic Fame,” will be at 4 p.m., Monday, April 19, 2010 in the Mabel Brown Room in the L.P. Young Student Center at Keene State College. Please join Dr. Ferber and the English Department faculty for an afternoon tea reception following the lecture.

Keene is Reading

For the ninth consecutive year matriculating students at Keene State College will take part in discussions of a book with members of the campus and Keene community. Coordinated by the department of English, the Keene is Reading program is designed to facilitate a campus-wide discussion of ideas, as well as to help first-year students make the transition to college, where the reading and discussing books is integral to the campus community. The reading program begins in the idea that becoming a more efficient, engaged, and productive reader is among the most meaningful outcomes of a college education.

The 2009-10 Keene is Reading book is The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.

For more information about the summer reading program, please contact the coordinator of the program, Dr. William Stroup, 8.2727 or wstroup@keene.edu.

Previous Reading Program Books
2009-10 Mark Kurlansky, Cod
2008-09 Michael Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma
2007-08 Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway
2006-2007 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
2005-06 Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains
2004-05 Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
2003-04 Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land
2002-03 Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues
2001-02 John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers