Fall 2019 - Spring 2020
Poetry Days presents Billy Collins
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar; he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently The Rain in Portugal (2016). In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate for 2001-2003. In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate for 2004-06. Billy Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College. In 2016 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Resources for students and teachers: Billy Collins
Eimear McBride:
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist. She wrote her first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), at age 27 and spent the next nine years trying to have it published. It subsequently received the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, as well as numerous shortlistings including the Folio Prize and the L.A. Times First Fiction Award. Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a "future classic" it has elicited widespread international praise that includes comparisons of McBride to Edna O'Brien, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, was published in September 2016 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. Eimear McBride occasionally writes and reviews for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman. She lives in Norwich, UK with her family.
Co-sponsored with the Irish Studies Program
Resources for students and teachers: Eimear McBride
Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Erasure: The Decriminalization of White America
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and appointed the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Previously, he served as the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the world’s leading research facilities dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. His book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America, explores the roots of the popular conception of black criminality in America. It won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book Award in American Studies. His articles and scholarship have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and the Washington Post. Muhammad is a native of the South Side of Chicago. He graduated with a B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and received his Ph.D. in American history from Rutgers University, specializing in 20th century United States and African-American history.
Resources for students and teachers: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Sanford Biggers: Negerplastic
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
7:00 p.m. | Devlin Hall, Room 101
A Los Angeles native working in New York City, Sanford Biggers creates artworks that integrate film, video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music and performance. He intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics, identity and art history in order to offer new perspectives and associations for established symbols. Through a multi-disciplinary formal process and a syncretic creative approach he makes works that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are conceptual. Biggers has recently exhibited work at the Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center and Mass MoCA. Biggers has won awards including the American Academy in Berlin Prize, Greenfield Prize, and the Lambent Fellowship in the Arts. Biggers is Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Visual Arts program.
Resources for students and teachers: Sanford Biggers
Patience Agbabi: Telling Tales
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Patience Agbabi is a poet and performer who has been featured on radio and TV worldwide. The author of four books, her latest, Telling Tales, published in 2014, is a vivid retelling of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century. Her other poetry collections include R.A.W. (1995), Transformatrix (2000) and Bloodshot Monochrome (2008). She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and is a former Poet Laureate of Canterbury. In 2004 she was nominated as one of the UK’s Next Generation Poets. Patience was a recipient of The Cholmondeley Award and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for New Work in Poetry. She has taught Creative Writing at several UK universities including Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent. She is currently a Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.
Resources for students and teachers: Patience Agbabi
Kurt Andersen: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Kurt Andersen is a brilliant analyst and synthesizer of historical and cultural trends, bestselling novelist, groundbreaking media entrepreneur, and host of public radio’s Studio 360. In his latest book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (2017), Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Andersen is also the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling novels True Believers (2012), Heyday (2007) and Turn of the Century (1999). He is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International broadcast on 217 stations and distributed by podcast to almost 1 million listeners in all each week. The show won Peabody Awards for broadcast excellence in both 2005 and 2013. Andersen’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and TIME, among others.
Mary Robinson
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Mary Robinson served as President of Ireland from 1990-1997 and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002. Currently, she serves as President of The Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice. She is Chair of The Elders, a member of the Club of Madrid, and the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from US President Barack Obama. She sits on the advisory board of Sustainable Energy For All (SE4All) and also serves on the board of the European Climate Foundation. Between 2013 and 2016 Mary served as the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy in three roles; first for the Great Lakes region of Africa, then on Climate Change and most recently as his Special Envoy on El Niño and Climate. Mary Robinson’s memoir, Everybody Matters was published in September 2012 and her book, Climate Justice - Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a Sustainable Future was published in September 2018.
Cosponsored by the Environmental Studies Program and Earth and Environmental Science Department.
Kiese Laymon: Heavy
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. He is the author of the powerful and provocative memoir Heavy (which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction), the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division. In addition to his work for Gawker, Laymon has written for Esquire, ESPN The Magazine, NPR, Colorlines, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Guernica, The Oxford American, Lit Hub, and many others. He is a Professor of English and African-American Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is also at work on a novel, And So On, out in 2020.
Bryan Stevenson: Just Mercy
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults. His numerous awards and honors include the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Prize and the National Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Just Mercy, which was named by Time Magazine as one of the 10 Best Books of Nonfiction for 2014 and has been awarded several honors including the Carnegie Medal by the American Library Association for the best nonfiction book of 2014 and a 2015 NAACP Image Award. Mr. Stevenson is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.
Cosponsored by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics and Boston College PULSE: Celebrating 50 Years of Service.
Kwame Anthony Appiah: Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. His most recent publication, The Lies That Bind, is based on his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures on “Mistaken Identities.” He is working on a book tentatively entitled On the Very Idea of Religion for Yale University Press, which is based on his 2016 Terry lectures at Yale. He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard, and lectured at a number of universities in the United States, France, Germany, Ghana, and South Africa. He is currently a professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, and teaches both in New York and Abu Dhabi.
Cosponsored by the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Global Citizens, and the International Studies Program.
Michael Witmore: Civic Shakespeare
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Michael Witmore is the seventh director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. He was formerly a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and before that he served as associate professor of English and assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He has held an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles, a research fellowship and a curatorial residency fellowship at the Folger, and a predoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Among his more recent projects, he launched the Working Group for Digital Inquiry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and organized the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His numerous publications include five books: Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare, with Rosamond Purcell (2010), (2009), Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (2007), Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800 (2006), and Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledge in Early Modern England (2001). He is currently working on a study of early modern wisdom literature and a book on the nature of digital inquiry in the humanities.
Carl Hart: Drug Use for Grown Ups: A Human Rights Perspective
Wednesday, November 14, 2019
7:00 p.m. | Gasson Hall, Room 100
Carl L. Hart is the Ziff Professor of Psychology in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He has published dozens of scientific articles in the area of neuropsychopharmacology and is co-author of the textbook Drugs, Society and Human Behavior (with Charles Ksir). His book High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know about Drugs and Society was the 2014 winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Fast Company magazine named Hart one of their Most Creative People of 2014.
Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series