Here’s the spring line-up:
**Special Event, URI Faculty Colloquium
Thursday, Feb. 15, 4 to 6 p.m. Prof. Stephen Barber
A recent recipient of a URI Research Award, Professor Stephen Barber will lecture on “Woolf’s Demon.” Barber is completing his manuscript, Exit Woolf, in which he examines the last writings of Virginia Woolf, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. What distinguishes the respective final phases of these thinkers from the earlier ones, and what compels the gathering of the three thinkers into consistence, is a common foray into ethics. Arrived at only after original re-conceptions of epistemology, power, subjectivity, and aesthetics, the ethical phase lays bare the ontology, the “senile sublime,” that is the hallmark of the final work of these three thinkers. A version of one of the chapters appears in Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges’ collection, Feminism and the Final Foucault and work from the Foucault section of the manuscript is forthcoming in Novel. Barber is also co-editor of Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory.
Thursday, March 8, 4 to 6 p.m. Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and the executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, N.J. and director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University-State University of New York. She has published eight books of poetry including, Where I Come From (1995), Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica Editions, 1998), and Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica, 2002). She is also co-editor with her daughter, Jennifer, of three anthologies published by Penguin/Putnam: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing up Ethnic in America. Her many awards include, the Angelie Lauri award, the John Fante Award, the May Sarton Award, and the American Literary Translator’s Award through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her new book, due out in early 2007, is All That Lies Between Us.
Thursday, March 29, 2007, 4 to 6 p.m. Nahid Machlin & Patricia Carlin
Nahid Rachlin is an Iranian born novelist and memoirist, who came to the United States to attend college and stayed. She’s the author of six books including the memoir, Persian Girls, 2006 (Penguin), four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to A Stranger (E.P. Dutton), The Heart’s Desire (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, Shenandoah, New Letters; and they have been reprinted in several anthologies. Her many awards include, the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Currently she teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. She has also taught at Yale University and Barnard College and a variety of summer writers conferences.
Poet, professor, and Shakespeare scholar, Patricia Carlin is the author of a book of criticism, Mortal Men: Overcoming Death in History, Comedy, and Tragedy (1992) and of the poetry collection Original Green (2003). Carlin’s poetry has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, Verse and elsewhere; she is an editor of Barrow Street; and co-founder of Barrow Street Press. Her prizes include the Distinguished Teaching Award from the New School where she teaches literature and poetry; she has also taught at Princeton and Vassar.
Wednesday April 18, 2007, 4 to 6 pm Jess Row & Aaron Smith
Jess Row is the author of The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of stories set in Hong Kong, which was short-listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2006. His work has appeared in many literary magazines and twice in The Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. A professor of English at The College of New Jersey, he lives in Princeton.
Aaron Smith is the prizewinning author of Blue on Blue Ground (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His chapbook, What’s Required, received the Frank O’Hara Award. His work has appeared in various publications including Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner. He is a poetry editor for Bloom and lives in New York City.