This week's Distinguished Writer: Carlo Rotella

Carlo Rotella '86 will give a public reading this Wednesday as part of Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

Rotella is the author of October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature, Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt, and, most recently, Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, which received the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, Boston, and Slate. His work has also appeared in Harper’s and Best American Essays, among others. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Du Bois Fellowship, and grants from the State Department for lecture tours in Bosnia and China. He co-edits the Chicago Visions and Revisions series at the University of Chicago Press, and he is Director of American Studies and Professor of English at Boston College.

What: Carlo Rotella Distinguished Writers Lecture
When: Wednesday, February 25th at 8 PM
Where: Russell House

This week's Distinguished Writer: Amy Bloom '75

Amy Bloom '75, the 2009 Jacob Julien Visiting Writer, will give a public reading tomorrow as part of Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series.

From the moment she started publishing fiction, Amy Bloom '75 has been the recipient of major awards. Her first story, Silver Water, won the National Magazine Award. She is the author of the novel A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, a collection of short stories entitled Come to Me, and the nonfiction work Normal. Her most recent novel, Away, was a New York Times bestseller. Praised as a writer of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, Bloom has been nominated for the National Books Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous anthologies here and abroad, and she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic.

[Wesleyan Events Calendar]

What: Amy Bloom Distinguished Writers Lecture
When: Wednesday, February 18th at 8 PM
Where: Russell House

For more information on Bloom, check out her website.

This week's Distinguished Writer: Rebecca Brown

Who is Rebecca Brown?

"If Samuel Beckett were a woman in late- 20th century America," one critic has noted, "he might have written stories like Brown's."

Rebecca Brown’s thirteenth book is a collection of eclectic essays in cultural criticism entitled American Romances. Her other works of fiction and nonfiction include The Terrible Girls, The Gifts of the Body, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, and Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary. Her writing has appeared in anthologies including Queer 13: Lesbian and Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade (edited by Wesleyan Visiting Writer Clifford Chase) and has been translated into Japanese, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Dutch. A frequent collaborator, she has written numerous texts for dance. Woman in Ill Fitting Wig is a book-length collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer. She has recently co-edited Looking Together, anthology of writers’ responses to work at the Frye Art Museum, which the University of Washington Press will publish in spring 2009.

What: Rebecca Brown - novelist, teacher, activist

When: Wednesday, February 11 at 8pm

Where: Russell House

Connecticut Poet Kurt Brown at Russell House

This week's Russell House event, poet Kurt Brown:

Connecticut Poetry Circuit Poet:
KURT BROWN

Kurt Brown was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island and in Connecticut. He spent many years in Aspen, Colorado, where he founded the Aspen Writers' Conference and edited the Aspen Anthology. Brown is editor of The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science and Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics as well as The True Subject, Writing It Down for James, and Facing the Lion.

He is the author of three award-winning chapbooks and two collections of poems, Return of the Prodigals and More Things in Heaven & Earth. Brown’s poems have appeared in many periodicals, including Ontario Review, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, and Southern Poetry Review.

Contact: Lucia Pier, russellhouse@wesleyan.edu
http://www.wesleyan.edu/writing/distinguished_writers/

Date: Wednesday, October 22
Time: 8:00 pm
Place: Russell House

Russell House hosts Alastair Reid

Lucia Pier writes:

The Russell House Series presents poet, translator, and essayist Alastair Reid. Since 1959, Reid has written for The New Yorker, playing a major role as staff writer, South American editor, traveling correspondent, and noted champion of Latin American literature. He is the author of over twenty books—poems, essays, prose chronicles, and translations—and his writings have been widely translated.

For more information, contact Lucia at russellhouse@wes or ext. 3448.

Date: Saturday, Oct. 18
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: Russell House

G. Pemberton returns to campus for discussion

Lucia Pier writes:

Celebrated essayist and former Wes professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies Gayle Pemberton will read and discuss her work at Russell House on Wednesday.

Pemberton is the author of The Hottest Water in Chicago: Notes of a Native Daughter and the forthcoming The Road to Gravure: Black Women and American Cinema. Her work appears in many major anthologies including The Art of The Personal Essay. Pemberton has been a Guggenheim Fellow and W.E.B DuBois Fellow at Harvard.

A reception will follow. Contact Lucia at russellhouse@wes for info.

Date: Wednesday, Sept. 17
Time: 8:00 PM
Location: Russell House

Retiring US Poet Laureate to perform tonight

Tonight, Retiring US Poet Laureate Charles Simic will speak/perform in Memorial Chapel, as the Russell House's first program of the year*. This will be the world premiere of a new musical work based on his poetry.

Composer Robert Carl has set 15 of Simic’s poems for an ensemble of four solo voices, directed by Music Prof. Neely Bruce. Simic will present a reading of the texts, followed by the performance of the music which sets them.

What: Charles Simic performs
When: Sunday, September 14 at 7 pm
Where: Memorial Chapel
$$$: Free

*Co-sponsored by the Edward W. Snowdon Fund, the Wesleyan Writing Program, and the Hartt School, University of Hartford.

Hilton Als to read at Russell House

Hilton Als, the English Department's 2008 Millet Writing Fellow, will be performing a reading at the Russell House on Wednesday, brought to you by the Wesleyan Writing Program and the English Department. The event is free, and open to the public.

Says Joanna Tice '07, Russell House Arts Fellow:

Hilton Als has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. Prior to that, he was a staff writer at The Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. His first book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published in 1996. He collaborated on film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston, and has edited and contributed to numerous museum catalogues, including the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art." In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03.

Date: Wednesday, April 2
Time: 8:00 PM
Location: Russell House