Spring 2020 Schedule
All events are free and open to the public.
Jillian Weise
Poet
WEDNESDAY, FEBUARY 12TH AT 7:30 PM IN THE NEW YORK ROOM, COOPER HALL
Jillian Weise is a poet, performance artist and disability rights activist. Her books of poetry include The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, The Book of Goodbyes (winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Laughlin Award) and Cyborg Detective, her most recent collection from BOA Editions. Her essays about being a cyborg appear in Granta, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics and the NYT. Her sci-fi novel, The Colony, features the characters of Charles Darwin, James Watson and Peter Singer. Weise has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Fulbright Program and the Lannan Foundation. She performs as the fictional character Tipsy Tullivan on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
Mitchell S. Jackson
Novelist/Essayist
WEDNESDAY, FEBUARY 26TH AT 7:30 PM IN THE NEW YORK ROOM, COOPER HALL
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years (Bloomsbury) won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships from the Lannan and Ford Foundations, PEN America, and New York Foundation for the Arts. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was published in the spring of 2019 and named a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. Jackson teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.
Oliver de la Paz
Poet
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25TH AT 7:30 PM IN THE NEW YORK ROOM, COOPER HALL
Oliver de la Paz is the author of five collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth. He also co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from NYFA and the Artist Trust and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. His work has been published in journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
Carolyn Forché
Poet, Translator, and Human Rights Advocate
Recipient of the 2020 Art of Fact Award
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29TH AT 7:30 PM AT THE BROCKPORT DOWNTOWN CAMPUS, REOC
Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. She is also the author of What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin, 2019), a memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and was followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.