Mary Cappello, URI professor of English is the author of Night Bloom: A Memoir and, most recently of Awkward: A Detour, a book-length essay on “awkwardness” that was a Los Angeles Times Bestseller was the first speaker.
Here’s the rest of the spring line-up:
Thursday, March 6, 4 to 5:45 p.m.
URI Professor Karen Stein and Rhode Island Poet Laureate, Lisa Starr
Karen Stein, URI professor of English and director of Women’s Studies, earned her doctorate in 1982 from the University of Connecticut. She publishes on contemporary North American women writers and is the author of Margaret Atwood Revisited. She is currently writing a book on Toni Morrison and is especially interested in the ways that contemporary women writers inflect Gothic themes and motifs. As director of the Women’s Studies Program, she has transformed the curriculum and developed a new graduate certificate program in Women’s Studies available to URI graduate students and non-matriculated students.
Lisa Silverberg Starr was recently named Poet Laureate for the state of Rhode Island. She has published two full-length collections of poetry: Days of Dogs and Driftwood (1993) and This Place Here (2001), and her individual works appear in journals and publications around the country. Starr is the founder of the Block Island Poetry Project, where along with her husband she owns and operates the Hygeia House.
Thursday, April 3, 4 to 6 p.m.
Poet Stephen Cramer & fiction writer Jody Lisberger
Stephen Cramer’s first book of poetry, Shiva’s Drum, was selected for the 2004 National Poetry Series by Grace Schulman. His second, Tongue & Groove was published by University of Illinois Press last year. His work has appeared in journals such as Green Mountains Review, Atlanta Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Southwest Review. He teaches poetry and writing at the University of Vermont and is currently writing under a grant from the Vermont Arts Council.
Jody Lisberger’s story collection, Remember Love, has just been published by Fleur-de-Lis Press. Her prizewinning fiction has appeared in Confrontation, Fugue, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, and Thema. She teaches in URI’s Women’s Studies Program, and is also on the faculty of the brief-residency M.F.A. in Writing Program at Spalding University in Louisville, Ky. Originally trained as an anthropologist, she received her doctorate in English at Boston University (1991), where she was a University Fellow. She also has a master’s of fine art in writing (1999) from Vermont College. She has taught at Holy Cross, Tufts, Harvard, and Brown and also worked as an editor, grant writer, and journalist.
Two Special Events with Fiction Writer Chris Cleave
Monday, April 14, 7 p.m. URI Kingston & Thursday, April 17, 7:30 p.m. URI Feinstein Providence Campus, 80 Washington Street Providence,
Chris Cleave bestselling author of the controversial novel Incendiary, about a suicide bomber at a soccer game, will come all the way from Europe, for two special events jointly sponsored with the Honors Program. Bookmarks Magazine, calls the work “an all-around stunning novel, even if Incendiary hadn’t eerily predicted the bombings on the London Tube (and hit British bookstores that same day), it would rank as one of this season’s novels to be missed at your own peril. Chris Cleave earned a degree from Oxford and worked for The Daily Telegraph. He lives in Paris with his wife and son.