Drawing parallels to VCU’s recent graduation ceremony, David Coogan celebrates a recent graduation ceremony for the residents at the Richmond City Jail participating in Open Minds, the program that brings faculty and students into the jail for courses in the liberal arts. Read article at http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/their-opinion/columnists-blogs/guest-columnists/article_6f5c7011-0bd7-55b1-827b-900505d9faf3.html.
Well done, Dave!
This year’s prestigious Philip B. Meggs Memorial scholarship recipient Nikki Fernandes, who will receive a bachelor’s degree in English this week, found that a VCU community engagement program made her feel closer to her university. Nikki has volunteered at Church Hill Academy, a private high school for at-risk youth, and taught at the Richmond City Jail. She became involved in the latter effort through a service-learning course, Open Minds, taught by David Coogan, an associate professor in the Department of English.
Attending graduate school may be in her future, but first Nikki will take a teaching job at Church Hill Academy, matching her passion for teaching literature with her desire to help others. Through her work with Open Minds, Nikki met prisoners who have struggled after lacking guidance and opportunities when they were younger. Nikki sees a chance to prevent similar future difficulties for the kids she will teach at Church Hill.
See Tom Gresham’s full article in VCU News at http://news.vcu.edu/news/Service_Minds.
The VCU Department of English ends its 2012-13 First Friday season with a lecture by Professor Nicholas Frankel, who will present “The Censoring of Oscar Wilde” on Friday, April 5, at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. All First Friday events are free and open to the public.
Stand Magazine, the British literary quarterly with its North American office here at VCU, is currently celebrating Stand‘s 60th-Anniversary and heading towards the publication this year of the 200th issue. The latest issue, no. 198, includes new work by Geoffrey Hill, Simon Armitage. Michael Schmidt, and others.
Our congratulations go out to MA student Heather Fox whose article, “Teaching Writing Strategy for Short Essay Response: Is It Possible to Level One of the Playing Fields?” was accepted for publication in NOTES, A Journal of the Georgia and Carolinas College English Association. The article is from a paper written for Elizabeth Hodges’ Writing and Rhetoric class, Fall 2011. This will be Heather’s first publication.
The VCU Department of English hosts a lecture by Professor David Latané as a part on its ongoing “First Friday” lecture series. The lecture will take place Friday, December 7th at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. Topic: “The London Press and the Case of Maria Foote: Privacy and the Press in 1824-25.” All First Friday events are free and open to the public.
You are cordially invited to the following Cabell First Novelist events next week! Please remember to register for the award ceremony on the Cabell First Novelist website:
http://novelist.library.vcu.edu
Details below!
1) Q&A. 2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m., Cabell Room, Fourth Floor, James Branch Cabell Library, 901 Park Ave. — 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist award recipient Justin Torres answers your questions about his book, We the Animals. Torres’s coming-of-age novel is narrated by the youngest sibling in a voice that is both compelling and urgent, and prose that is brutally honest and beautifully poetic. Composed in short, disjointed chapters, the novel swiftly moves through six years in the tumultuous childhood of three brothers as they claw their way toward adulthood. Christopher Isherwood of The New York Times described Torres’s novel as relating “an affecting story of love, loss and the irreversible trauma that a single event can bring to a family.” Please come early and bring your questions about this remarkable book.
2) Award Presentation, Reading, Book Sale/Signing and Reception. 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Grace Street Theater, 934 West Grace Street. – Author Justin Torres, his agent Jin Auh of The Wylie Agency, and his editor Jenna Johnson of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will discuss the journey of We the Animals from concept to publication. Moderated by Valley Haggard, local writer, creative writing teacher, and director of Richmond Young Writers, the discussion will include audience questions and focus on the nuts and bolts of publishing a debut novel.
PLEASE REGISTER for the event on the Cabell First Novelist website:
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly and VCU’s own Harrison Fletcher will be reading on Thursday, October 11th at 7PM in the VCU Scott House. This event is free and open to the public.
Stanley Plumly’s work has been honored with the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Awards, Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at many universities around the country, including the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Washington; Ohio University; Princeton; Columbia; the University of Houston; and New York University. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English at the University of Maryland.
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life. He is a New Letters Literary Award winner, and finalist for the National Magazine Award, Bakeless Literary Prize, Pen Center USA and Santa Fe Writers Project awards. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including New Letters, Fourth Genre, Cimarron Review, Water~Stone Review, and Puerto del Sol. One of his essays, “Beautiful City of Tirzah,” was selected by the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction as among 50 outstanding works since 1970. An MFA graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, he recently joined the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.
The VCU Department of English hosts a lecture by Professor Kate Nash as a part on its ongoing “First Friday” lecture series. The lecture will take place Friday, October 5th at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. Topic: “Relocating the Implied Author in Woolf’s Late Manuscripts.” All First Friday events are free and open to the public.
Professors Jennifer Rhee and David Golumbia will be presenting papers this weekend in Milwaukee at the annual Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference, with the theme “Nonhuman.” The topics of their respectice papers are “The Anti-Robot Proprioception of Simon Penny’s Petit Mal” and “Game of Drones.”
For more information check out the conference program.
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by the winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize Katherine Larson (Radial Symmetry). This annual award is given in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2011. Larson will receive an honorarium of $2000 and will be brought to Richmond, all expenses paid, for a reception and public reading on September 20th, 2012 to be held at 8PM at the Grace Street Theater. This event is free and open to the public.
Katherine Larson is the author of Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011), selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larson’s work has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In addition to writing, she has worked as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.
This year the Prize Committee would also like to recognize two finalists, Anthony Carelli for his collection Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Brian Barker for The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).
The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with additional funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.
For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_prize.htm
Victorian Mixed Media
Victorians Institute Annual Conference
19-20 October 2012
The conference will feature papers presented by 70+ scholars from around the country and abroad. The plenary speaker will be W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. Professor Mitchell’s talk is titled “Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture.” He is the author most recently of Seeing through Race (Harvard University Press, 2012); earlier books from the University of Chicago Press include What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (2005) and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998). He is the editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.
The conference will also feature a celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Browning, with three panels of papers devoted to his work, followed by a plenary address by Herbert F. Tucker, the John C. Coleman Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Professor Tucker’s lecture is titled, “Unsettled Scores: Structure and Play in Browning’s Music Poems.” He is the author of Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford 2008) as well as Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, and Browning’s Beginnings. He is also editor of the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and (along with Dorothy Mermin) Victorian Literature: 1830-1900.
As part of the conference, “Robert Browning, 1812-1889—The First Modern Media Poet: A Bicentenary Selection from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection” will be on display in VCU Cabell Library Special Collections Department from the start of the conference until the end of the semester.
There will also be a musical and a theatrical performance.
More information can be found at the conference web page.
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Radial Symmetry by Katherine Larson has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2011. The award is named in memory of the late Larry Levis, the poet who taught at VCU. Larson will receive an honorarium of $2000 and will be brought to Richmond, expenses paid, for a reception and public reading on September 20th, 2012.
Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011) was also selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larsen’s work has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In addition to her literary career, Larson has worked as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.
This year the Prize Committee would also like to recognize the outstanding books of two additional finalists, Anthony Carelli for his collection Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Brian Barker for The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).
The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with primary funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to all who entered and thus helped to make this annual contest such a success.
For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_prize.htm, call 804.828.1329, or contact Katelyn Kiley, Levis Fellow, at kileyk@vcu.edu
The VCU Department of English hosts a lecture by Professor Jennifer Rhee as a part on its ongoing “First Friday” lecture series. The lecture will take place Friday, April 6th at 3:00pm in Hibbs 308. Topic: “Ryoji Ikeda’s Infinities: The Digital Subject and Privacy in the Age of Big Data.” All First Friday events are free and open to the public.