MYJOHNSHOPKINS.EDU
Reading Series: Spring 2013
The Writing Seminars Presents: the Turnbull Lecture by Les Murray
Tuesday, April 9th 2013 6:30pm - 8:00pm in the Hodson Hall Auditorium (room #110)
Leslie Allan Murray is the outstanding Austrailian poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he sees his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian. Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby.
He is one of Australia's most influential literary critics and a prolific contributor of book reviews and literary articles to newspapers and journals, and has acted as poetry reader for the publisher Angus & Robertson, edited the magazine Poetry Australia, and was literary editor of the journal Quadrant. Four selections of his prose pieces have appeared in volume form: The Peasant Mandarin (1978), Persistence in Folly (1984), Blocks and Tackles (1990) and A Working Forest (1997).
His books of poetry include The llex Tree (1969), The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969), Poems Against Economics (1972), Selected Poems: The Vernacular Republic (1976), Ethnic Radio (1977), The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), Equanimities (1982), The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961-1981 (1982), The People's Otherworld (1983), The Daylight Moon (1987), The Idyll Wheel (1989), Dog Fox Field (1990), Translations from the Natural World (1992), Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), Fredy Neptune (1998), Conscious & Verbal (2000), Learning Human: New Selected Poems (2001), Poems the Size of Photographs (2002), New Collected Poems (2002), The Biplane Houses (2006), Selected Poems (2007), and Taller When Prone (2010).
Murray has been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, most recently the Petrarch Prize, funded by the German government. Until 1988 he lived chiefly in Sydney; from that year on he has made his home on a small farm just a few miles from where he spent his boyhood. His volume of poems The Idyll Wheel reflects his sense of joyful renewal at this return to his rural roots.
Graduate Readings
In addition to our deparmental reading series, our MFA graduates host the weekly Tudor & Stuart Reading Series, featuring one poet and one fiction writer currently working toward their MFA degree.
Past Readings
The Writing Seminars Presents: Sullivan Elder Visiting Writer David Yezzi
Tuesday, February 26th 2013 6:30pm - 8:00pm in the Hodson Hall Auditorium (room #110)
David Yezzi’s poetry collections include class="Apple-converted-space" Azores (2008) and class="Apple-converted-space" The Hidden Model class="Apple-converted-space" (2003), and his criticism and poetry have appeared in class="Apple-converted-space" The New York Times Book Review, class="Apple-converted-space" The Wall Street Journal, and Best American Poetry. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Yezzi is Executive Editor of class="Apple-converted-space" The New Criterion. He has also edited The Swallow Anthology of New American Poetry class="Apple-converted-space" (2009). His libretto for a chamber opera by composer David Conte, class="Apple-converted-space" Firebird Motel, premiered in 2003 and was released on CD by Arsis (2007). Poet-critic class="Apple-converted-space" Adam Kirsch, who selected class="Apple-converted-space" Azores class="Apple-converted-space" as one of class="Apple-converted-space" Slate’s Best Books of 2008, noted that Yezzi’s poetry “displays a civilized mastery reminiscent of class="Apple-converted-space" Philip Larkin class="Apple-converted-space" and class="Apple-converted-space" Donald Justice, which no poet of his generation can match.” David Yezzi is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University and received his MFA from Columbia University.
CANCELLED: The Writing Seminars Presents: Chaffee Visiting Writer Andrew Motion
Tuesday, March 26th 2013 6:30pm - 8:00pm in the Hodson Hall Auditorium (room #110)
Andrew Motion was born in 1952. He read English at University College, Oxford and subsequently spent two years writing about the poetry of Edward Thomas for an M. Litt. From 1976 to 1980 he taught English at the University of Hull; from 1980 to 1982 he edited the Poetry Review and from 1982 to 1989 he was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. He is now Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London. He was knighted for his services to literature in 2009. Sir Andrew is a council member of the Advertising Standards Authority and, since last July, Chairman of the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council. Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 until 2009.
His new collection of poems is The Cinder Path (Faber) and Ways of Life: Places, Painters and Poets (Faber) is his latest collection of essays.
The Writing Seminars Presents: A Reading by Stephen O'Connor
Monday, February 4th 2013 6:00pm - 8:00pm in the Tudor Stuart Room, at the southeast corner of the third floor of Gilman Hall (room #388)
Stephen O'Connor will be discussing "Ziggurat," his short story that appeared in The New Yorker in 2009. O’Connor is the author of the short story collections, Here Comes Another Lesson and Rescue. His nonfiction books include: Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, a memoir, and Orphan Trains, The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed, a narrative history. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Partisan Review, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, and many other places. His poetry has been in Poetry Magazine, The Missouri Review, Agni, Knockout, and Green Mountains Review. His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, Doubletake, Agni, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and elsewhere.
He is the recipient of the Cornell Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing from Columbia University, the Visiting Fellowship for Historical Research by Artists and Writers from the American Antiquarian Society, and the DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. Will My Name Be Shouted Out? was named 1996 "Book of the Year" by Kappa Delta Pi, an education honor society. Orphan Trains was designated 2001 best book on “the roots of juvenile crime” by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. He teaches in the writing MFA programs of Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence. For eight years he directed and taught in Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s flagship creative writing program at a public school in New York City. He has received a B.A. from Columbia University, and an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, both in English literature.
The Writing Seminars Presents: A Reading by Heather O'Neill
Tuesday, Nov. 13th 2012 6:30pm - 8:00pm - Remsen Hall Auditorium (101)
Heather O’Neill is a writer who lives in Montreal. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals was published in 2006. It won the Canada Reads competition and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was nominated for, among others, the Orange Prize and the Governor General’s Award. She has also published a collection of poetry and has written a screenplay. She has twice been awarded the Gold Prize at the Canadian National Magazine Awards for her essays. Her new novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is forthcoming.
The Writing Seminars Presents: A Reading by Mark Strand
Wed. Nov 7 2012 6:30pm - 8:00pm - Shriver Hall
Mark Strand is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Almost Invisible (Knopf, 2012) Man and Camel (2006); Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (1993); The Continuous Life (1990); The Story of Our Lives (1973); and Reasons for Moving (1968), as well as Selected Poems (1990) and New Selected Poems (2009). He has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation, several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children.
His honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from The Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
All Writing Seminars readings are free and open to the public.