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A glance at the fall schedule for the Lowell Humanities Series, which brings some of the world’s brightest literary lights to Boston College. All events take place in Gasson 100 at 7 p.m. and are free and open to the public.
Oct. 1: Matt Taibbi • In his New York Times bestseller The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, Taibbi takes readers on a journey through both sides of our new system of justice: the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. As he narrates these stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source, and unveils what we need to do to stand up against the troubling trend of “the Divide.” In 2008, he won the National Magazine Award for his columns in Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor. He is also the author of The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion.
Oct. 14: Mark Edmundson • In Why Football Matters, Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, considers the paradoxical game that transformed him as a young man. His many other books include Why Read?, Why Teach?, Kings of Rock and Roll, The Death of Sigmund Freud, and Nightmare on Main Street. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The American Scholar and Raritan, to which he is a contributing editor.
Oct. 22: Stuart Dybek • Dybek is the author of five books of fiction, most recently Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern. He also has two volumes of poetry, Brass Knuckles and Streets In Their Own Ink, and has received such literary awards as the PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize, a Lannan Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and four O. Henry Prizes. In 2007, he was awarded both a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He teaches at Northwestern University where he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence.
Nov. 5: Laura Kasischke • A poet and novelist, Kasischke has won numerous awards for her poetry and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Tackling such subjects as global pandemics and school shootings, Kasischke’s novels – which include Suspicious River, White Bird in a Blizzard and The Life Before her Eyes, which was made into a 2007 movie starring Uma Thurman – have enjoyed popular appeal. (Presented by Poetry Days)
Nov. 12: Peter Fallon • The 2012-13 Burns Library Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, Fallon grew up on a farm in the Irish midlands and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, where he is now an adjunct professor of English. A prize-winning poet, his books include News of the World: Selected and New Poems, The Georgics of Virgil and The Company of Horses. At age 18, he founded The Gallery Press, Ireland’s leading literary publishing company, and has edited and published 500 books of poems and plays by the country’s finest established and emerging authors, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, John Montague and Brian Friel.
Nov. 19: Jeff Chang • Executive director of Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Chang won the American Book Award for Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. His new work, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, examines the cultural transformation of the US over the last three decades. Chang was editor of Total Chaos, an anthology on the influence of hip-hop culture into other art forms, and has written for The Nation, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, VIBE, and The LA Review of Books.For more information on the Lowell Humanities Series, see www.bc.edu/lowellhs.