Featured Events Schedule

Upcoming Events

Last Word is a celebration of the work that the English graduate students have done throughout their time at the University of Cincinnati. A formal event, with readings by all of the graduating MA & PhD students and dinner. It is open to all English graduate students & their families, as well as faculty & staff of the English Dept. Please RSVP with name and # of guests to Mark Manibusen (manibume@mail.uc.edu). The event will be held on Saturday, June 2, 6:00PM, at the Max Kade Center (room 736 Old Chem). Event is sponsored by EGO and the English department administration.
Novel Reading Followed by Q&A and Refreshments: Myriam J.A. Chancy Fiction and Other Readings
Friday, May 11, 2012
3 p.m.
Braunstein Hall, Room 325
Free and open to the public

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Word Without End
Saturday, May 12, 2012
6 p.m. till 9 p.m.
Christy's biergarten in Clifton
Free and open to the public

Word Without End is an annual event hosted by The Cincinnati Review. An open-mic, cross-genre extravaganza, Word Without End is open to students, professors, staff, and people from the community who want to perform something related to this year's theme: Aspiration. Special guest Margaret Luongo (Miami University) will read her fiction.

Wright

Carolyne Wright
Monday, April 23, 2012
TALK ON TRANSLATION: 3:00 pm
POETRY READING: 8:00 pm
Both events in the Elliston Poetry Room
Free and open to the public

Carolyne Wright has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently Mania Klepto: The Book of Eulene (Turning Point Books, 2012) and A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006). She has also translated poetry from Spanish and Bengali and is the author of Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women (White Pine Press, 2008). She is the Distinguished Northwest Poet at Seattle University.

Jonathan Alexander Lecture
Thursday, April 12, 7:00
College of Law, Room 114
"Rhetoric, Literacy, and the Digital"

AlexanderMichael Warner has characterized contemporary public spheres as built around practices of citation and iterability as opposed to rational argument. How do communication technologies contribute to such a characterization, and what kinds of rhetorical and literacy practices might need to be fostered to meet the demands of increasingly digitized public spheres? Jonathan Alexander addresses these questions by unpacking some of the debates surrounding digitality and its sometimes praised, sometimes bemoaned impact on literacy. In the process, Alexander argues that understanding digitality demands a robust engagement with the humanities, particularly as notions of individual and collective agency shift in digital spheres. At the same time, he also maintains that the humanities must embrace interdisciplinary relations with the technical sciences, and that what we mean by "digital literacy" may increasingly depend on such interdisciplinarity.

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor's Fellow and Professor of English and Education at the University of California, Irvine, where he also serves as Director of Campus Writing Programs. Jonathan's research areas include Writing Studies, Composition/Rhetoric, New Media Studies, and Sexuality Studies. His scholarly work focuses primarily on the use of emerging communications technologies in the teaching of writing and in shifting conceptions of what writing, composing, and authoring mean. Jonathan also works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what theories of sexuality, particularly queer theory, have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies. Jonathan's books include Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web (Hampton Press), Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies (Utah State University Press) Bisexuality and Queer Theory (edited with Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio); Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (edited with Marcia Dickson; Hampton Press), Argument Now, a Brief Rhetoric (written with Margaret M. Barber; Longman), Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies (with Deborah Meem and Michelle Gibson; Sage), and Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others (edited with Karen Yescavage; Harrington Park Press). Jonathan is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Articles in the field of Computers and Composition Studies, and in 2011 he received the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing.

Poetry Reading: Linda Hogan

Monday, April 2 at 8:00 p.m.

427 Engineering Research Center

Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist, is widely considered to be one of the most influential and provocative Native American figures in the contemporary American literary landscape, and is an internationally recognized public speaker. Her most recent books are the poetry collection, Rounding the Human Corners (Coffee House Press, 2008), and the novel, People of the Whale (Norton, 2008). Her other books include the novels Mean Spirit, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award; Solar Storms, a finalist for the International Impact Award, and Power. Her collection of poetry The Book of Medicines was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry books have received the Colorado Book Award and an American Book Award.

Her nonfiction includes The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir, and Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. In addition, she has co-authored, with Brenda Peterson, Sightings: The Mysterious Journey of the Gray Whale for National Geographic Books, edited several anthologies on nature and spirituality, and written the script, Everything Has a Spirit, a PBS documentary on American Indian Religious Freedom. Her newest work was as editor for thirty years of Parabola essays, the series The Inner Journey: Native Traditions, from Morning Light Press, just out, and a short documentary for PBS/American Experience, for the REEL/NATIVE series, A Feel for the Land.

Image Journal says "Linda Hogan can teach us a generous vision of nature. In her poems, novels, stories, and nonfiction, she shows a love of the created order that exists not at the expense of love of humanity, but as a fuller expression of that love. To be human, according to her vision, is to be situated on the planet, and to be sensitive to its moods, its angles, its secrets, and its kinds of life—animal, vegetable, and even mineral. Hogan possesses the skill of standing in awe of the earth’s mysteries, a sensitivity to the grace present in nature. Her language—careful, polished, serene, and strange—shocks us awake to the grandeur around us, and reminds us of our part in it. Hogan shows us our smallness, yes, but also our giftedness, our blessedness. This is not a fearful smallness, but the smallness of humility before something wildly, mightily alive."

Hogan has received a prestigious Lannan Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from both the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and Wordcraft Circle. She has also received the Mountains and Plains Lifetime Achievement award and has been inducted into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame. A Professor Emerita from the University of Colorado, she is now the Writer-in-Residence for The Chickasaw Nation and lives in Oklahoma.

Called a “quintessential econovelist” by Dana Seaman, environmental issues are the major focus in all of Hogan’s work, writing, and teaching. She has been involved for thirteen years with the Native Science Dialogues and the new Native American Academy and for four years with the graduate SEED Institute. She was an invited writer-speaker at the United Nations Forum, has had work translated in all major languages, and speaks both nationally and internationally, including in Alcala Spain as keynote speaker at the Eco-criticism. She has also worked with Native youth in horse programs.

Bio and photo courtesy of www.blueflowerarts.com

UC Writers' Night: Back Room Reading Series

Thursday, April 5 from 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.

MOTR Pub (off-campus)

1345 Main St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Poetry Reading: Lisa Ampleman, Brian Brodeur and Andrew Grace

Friday, April 6 at 3:00 p.m.

Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Lisa Ampleman is the author of I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You, (Kent State University Press, Spring 2012), winner of the 2010 Wick Chapbook competition. Born in St. Louis, she received degrees from Beloit College (BA) and George Mason University (MFA).  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Cave Wall; Court Green; Forklift, Ohio; Massachusetts Review; New Ohio Review; New South; Notre Dame Review; and South Dakota Review.  A Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry prize winner and 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship finalist, Ampleman is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.

Brian Brodeur is the author of Natural Causes (forthcoming 2011), winner of the 2010 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize; Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize; and the chapbook So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 2007). Recent poems and reviews have appeared in Copper Nickel, Gettysburg Review, Margie, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and Verse Daily. Brian maintains the blog “How a Poem Happens,” an online anthology of over one hundred and fifty interviews with poets. He lives with his wife in Cincinnati where he is the Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the PhD in English and Comparative Literature program at the University of Cincinnati.

Andrew Grace's third book Sancta is recently out from Ahsahta Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, LIT, Nimrod and Southern Poetry Review.  A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, he currently lives in Gambier, OH where he is a consulting editor at the Kenyon Review.

Fiction Reading: Kelcey Parker

Friday, April 13 at 4:00 p.m.

Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Kelcey Parker is the author of For Sale by Owner (Kore Press), winner of the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award in Short Fiction. Her next book, Liliane’s Balcony, set at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house, is forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in 2013. She is a recipient of an Individual Artist's Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, and her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals including Image, where she was featured as Artist of the Month in November 2009. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and currently directs the creative writing program at Indiana University South Bend.

 

Fiction Reading: Colson Whitehead

Thursday, April 19 at 7:00 p.m.

Tangeman University Center Cinema, Room 220

Colson Whitehead is the author of The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award; John Henry Days, winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; Apex Hides the Hurt, recipient of the PEN/Oakland Award; and Sag Harbor, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His most recent novel is Zone One (published in October 2011), which Esquire called “the best book of the fall.”

Whitehead is also the author of The Colossus of New York, a book of essays about the city, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” and a Whiting Writers Award, Colson Whitehead has published reviews, essays, and fiction in publications such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta.

Carolyne Wright

Talk on Translation: Monday, April 23 at 3:00 p.m.

Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Poetry Reading: Monday, April 23 at 8:00 p.m.

Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

UC Writers' Night: Back Room Reading Series

Thursday, May 3 from 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.

MOTR Pub (off-campus)

1345 Main St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Poetry Reading: Morgan Frank and Caki Wilkinson

Friday, May 4 at 4:00 p.m.

Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Ropes Lecture: Alan Liu

Thursday, May 10 at 7:00 p.m.

427 Engineering Research Center

“Close, Distant, and Unexpected Reading: New Forms of Literary Reading in the Digital Age”

In the last few decades, an uneasy detente has existed in literary studies between “close reading” methods descended from the New Criticism and poststructuralist or cultural-critical methods that became prominent after May 1968. Recently, however, text-analysis methods developed in the digital humanities have come into conjunction with the work of Franco Moretti and other participants in a “new sociology of literature” to reenergize this conflict in the form of the “close reading vs. distant reading” debate. Drawing on first-hand interviews with Yale University English Department faculty who were instrumental in institutionalizing the New Criticism in the 1940’s, Liu takes an unusual approach to the close reading vs. distant reading debate by showing that close reading was itself already distant reading. The talk closes with a critique of both close reading and the rapidly hardening conventions of distant reading for conforming to a modern understanding of “analysis” that forecloses unexpected forms of reading made possible in digital environments.

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Alan Liu is Professor and Chair in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches in the fields of digital humanities, British Romantic literature and art, and literary theory. He has published three books: Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford University Press, 1989), The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Liu is principal investigator of the University of California's multi-campus research group on “Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading” and a founding member of the 4Humanities (“Advocating for the Humanities”) initiative. Previously, he founded and directed the UC Santa Barbara Transcriptions Project and served on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. Some of his other online projects include the Voice of the Shuttle and (as general editor) The Agrippa Files.

Terrance Hayes: Elliston Poet-in-Residence

Reading: Tuesday, May 15 at 8:00 p.m.

Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

Talks: Friday, May 18 and Friday, May 25 at 4:00 p.m.

Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library

One of the most compelling voices in American poetry, Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry; Lighthead (2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including two Pushcart selections, four Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Lighthead, his most innovative collection, investigates how we construct experience, presenting “the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time.” Its citation for the National Book Award described it as a "dazzling mixture of wisdom and lyric innovation." In Muscular Music, Hayes takes reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. In Wind in a Box he explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality with the unifying motif being the struggle for freedom within containment. In Hip Logic, Hayes confronts racism, sexism, religion, family structure, and stereotypes with overwhelming imagery.

Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase, very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. He writes, "There are recurring explorations of identity and culture in my work and rather than deny my thematic obsessions, I work to change the forms in which I voice them. I aspire to a poetic style that resists style. In my newest work I continue to be guided by my interests in people: in the ways community enriches the nuances of individuality; the ways individuality enriches the nuances of community."

A Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, Hayes lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and children.

Bio and photo courtesy of www.blueflowerarts.com

Annual Awards Reception

Thursday, May 31 at 1:00 p.m.

400B Tangeman University Center

Recognition of the winners of the annual English Department Writing Prize Competition, department scholarships, and Boyce Teaching award.

Works in Progress: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Friday, June 1

9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Call for Proposals

Event Website: http://uccompconference.blogspot.com/ 

The English Department at the University of Cincinnati invites you to submit proposals for an interdisciplinary academic conference focusing on the value of sharing works in progress as a means to increase experimentation, build community, and test new ideas. Rather than soliciting finished products from participants, we seek work that shows its seams, represents thinking in action, invites revision, and resists closure. In other words, don't hide your process; advertise it.

Changing concepts of materiality, influencing everything from mediums to social communication, have highlighted the importance of process to all forms of production. In this spirit, we encourage projects that take process seriously, that understand process - how things are made, how ideas cohere, how writing happens - as a legitimate and compelling object of study. Projects could include but aren’t limited to explorations of the academic and the technical; pedagogical, artistic and scholarly experiments and practices; and reflective, theoretical, rhetorical, creative, or critical works.

We encourage presenters to experiment with the genre of their presentations. Presenters should feel welcome to take advantage of multimodal delivery. Presentations might take the form of a PowerPoint project, a short film, an interactive discussion or workshop, some combination of these, or other possibilities.

Ropes Lecture Series Archive