Monday, January 26, 2015

Monday Muse: Winter-Spring Lannan Readings

Tuesday, February 10, begins the final series of readings in the 2014-15 series of Lannan Readings at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. All of the events are free and open to the public, and all take place at 8:00 p.m., on campus in the Copley Formal Lounge (37th & O Sts., N.W.).

Today's post spotlights the readings, which will continue into April. 

✭ Nairobi-born Okwiri Oduor appears on February 10. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing (2014), for her story "My Father's Head", which appears in Feast, Famine and Potluck (Short Story Day Africa, 2014), Oduor teaches creative writing to young girls who attend her alma mater in Kenya. Currently, the writer, a MacDowell Colony Fellow (2014), is working on a full-length novel. She is the author of a novella The Dream Chasers.

Okwiri Oduor on FaceBook

✭ On February 24, poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay will be joined on the podium by poet and writer Fanny Howe.

Alcalay is the author of a little history (re:public/UpSet Press, 2013), Islanders (City Lights, 2010), Scrapmetal (Factory School, 2007), and After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), in addition to other books.

Read Ammiel Alcalay's poem "Order".

"Ammiel Alcalay on Amiri Baraka" at Upset Press

Poet and novelist Howe has published more than 20 books of prose and poetry, most recently the collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, July 2014). Recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2009), Howe also has been awarded fellowships from Bunting Institute, MacDowell Colony, and National Endowment for the Arts. Howe is a Visiting Lecturer in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Read Fanny Howe's poems "The Hut" and "Veteran".

Fanny Howe at Penn Sound

March 17 will bring together poets Peter Gizzi and Michael Palmer.

Gizzi is the recipient of a Lavan Younger Poets Award (19940 from the Academy of American Poets and, more recently, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, among other honors; he was the 2011 Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. He published this year In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan). His most recent chapbook is In the Air (Manor House, 2013), with artwork by Richard Kraft.

A collaborator with visual artists and composers, Palmer published his first poetry collection, Blake's Newton (Black Sparrow Press, now Black Sparrow Books) in the early 1970s. His awards include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation (1989) and the 2001 Shelley Memorial Award (Poetry Society of America).

Peter Gizzi Resources Online

Read Michael Palmer's poem "Stone".

✭ Closing out the season on April 21 is Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu. The recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant (2012), a "5 Under 35" Award from the National Book Foundation (2007), and a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2006), Mengestu has written three novels: All Our Names (Knopf, 2014 ), How to Read the Air  (Riverhead Trade, 2010; Reprint 2011), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books, 2008; Reprint 2008). The latter is the winner of a Guardian First Book Award.

Dinaw Mengestu at The New Yorker

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