Katy Didden, author of The Glacier’s Wake and winner of the Lena Miles Wever Todd prize, will be giving a poetry reading this Wednesday, May 15 at 4 p.m. in the Joslin Atrium. Katy Didden is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships and her poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Missouri Review. To learn more about her work, visit her website at <www.katydidden.com>.
Professor Alison Sainsbury’s will present her Faculty Colloquium talk, titled “Women’s Domestic Humor and ‘The Problem That Has No Name,’ or, How My Aunt Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Home,” this Friday, November 4, at 4 PM in CNS 101.
In her talk, Dr. Sainsbury will speak about her aunt, Kay Nelson, a writer of domestic humor who was a regular contributor to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Look, and Good Housekeeping in the same era in which Betty Friedan published her groundbreaking feminist book The Feminine Mystique. A piece by her aunt appeared, in fact, in the same issue of Good Housekeeping in which Friedan published the first excerpt of The Feminine Mystique.
“Even had my aunt’s work not so neatly overlapped in that issue of Good Housekeeping with Friedan’s challenge to assumptions about women’s so-called natural role and place in the home,” says Dr. Sainsbury, “my aunt’s time as a working writing and the subject and genre of her writing–the foibles of life in just such middle-class suburban households as Friedan anatomizes in her book–would still place her and her work squarely into this gathering energy of second-wave feminism….My contention is that looking at my aunt’s work and her correspondence with her editor leads us to a more nuanced and complex reading of both the literary genre of women’s domestic humor and the issues at play in Friedan’s book.”
The event is free and open to the public. Please come join us for what promises to be a fascinating talk.
Lyrical Graffiti is bringing Chicago poet Tim Stafford to perform at Illinois Wesleyan on Thursday, October 6, at 7 PM in CNS 102. Tim’s performance will be preceded by a student open mic and followed by a student slam.
“Tim Stafford is one of the funniest writers in the business,” write the Lyrical Graffiti organizers. “He’s worked with Mental Graffiti, the Encyclopedia Show, and the Green Mill in Chicago and was one half of the hilarious Death From Below poetry duo. His most recent project, Learn then Burn, is a compilation of some of the best contemporary and slam poetry that is content- and language-appropriate for elementary and high school classrooms.”
“We are here to discuss literature,” the program for the 2011 MUSE Undergraduate Literature Conference announces. ”Within literature lies the complexity of human nature, the breadth of human intellect, and the depth of human experience.”
Come join the conversation on Saturday, October 1. This year’s conference, sponsored as always by the Alpha Eta Pi chapter of the English honors society Sigma Tau Delta, will feature a wide range of outstanding undergraduate papers on topics from Shakespeare to Culture and Ethnic Identity, panels on graduate schools and the library, and keynote speaker Susan Phillips, who will speak on “Learning to Talk Shop: Gossip, Merchants, and Medieval Language Lessons.” The event is free and open to the public.
A program with a full listing of events and papers is available here. (Mac users should be forewarned that Preview may not display the document correctly; please use Adobe Reader instead.)
A National Poetry Month reading has been scheduled for 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 20, at Heartland Community College, CCB 1406.
Featured poets will be IWU’s Joanne Diaz, whose book The Lessons won the 2010 Gerald Cable Book Award, and Matthew Guenette, author of Sudden Anthem (winner of the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize) and American Busboy (a finalist and editor’s choice of the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize).
To get to Heartland College from IWU, take Main Street north past ISU to Raab Road. Turn left on Raab and look for Heartland College on the right, just past the Corn Crib baseball field.
The Spring 2011 issue of Tributaries is back from the printers, and you can get a free copy this Tuesday, April 12, at an 8:00 p.m. release party in the Turfler Room of the Memorial Center.
Editors invite you to come and celebrate, “because everyone could use a little more creative writing.”
The new issue features work by . . . oh, heck, I’m not going to tell you. Just come to the party and find out!
The Sigma Tau Delta Executive Board announced that the spring colloquium will be held at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 31, at the home of Professor Dan Terkla. Dan lives 6-7 blocks east of campus on 18 White Place. Presenters this time will be seniors Nicole Travis and Kevin Hogan.