Y’all, we have so much good stuff coming up this semester! Here’s a quick list of just some of our fall semester events. Keep an eye on our events calendar for more. We hope to see you there!
Creative Writing Reading Series
Kathryn Miles
September 27, 2018. 7:30 PM
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art
Kathryn Miles is an award-winning journalist and science writer. Her latest books are Quakeland and Superstorm. Her essays and articles have appeared in Best American Essays, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.
From her website bio: “Kathryn Miles received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Saint Louis University and took both her Master of Arts and Doctorate in English from the University of Delaware. Miles is the author of four books: Adventures with Ari, All Standing, Superstorm, and Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including Best American Essays, The Boston Globe, Down East, Ecotone, History, The New York Times, Outside, Pacific Standard, Popular Mechanics, and Time. She currently serves as writer-in-residence at Green Mountain College and as a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council. She lives in Portland, Maine.”
Khadijah Queen
October 25, 2018. 7:30 PM
Lory Student Center, Longs Peak
Khadijah Queen is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at University of Colorado, Boulder. Her latest books are I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, and Fearful Beloved. Her poetry and prose can be found in Fence, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and widely elsewhere.
From her website bio: “Khadijah Queen is the author of five books, most recently I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017). Earlier poetry collections include Conduit (Akashic / Black Goat 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011) and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance Writing. The prize included a full staged production of the play at Theaterlab NYC from December 10 – 20, 2015 by Fiona Templeton’s The Relationshiptheater company. Individual poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Fence, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, Poor Claudia, The Offing, jubilat, Memoir, Tupelo Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, DIAGRAM, The Volta Book of Poets, LitHub, The Force of What’s Possible and widely elsewhere. Reviews of her work can be found in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, BOMB Magazine, SCOUT, Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review, Open Letters Monthly, The Volta, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and other publications. She serves as core faculty in poetry and playwriting for the new Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University.”
Writer’s Harvest:
Rebecca Brown
November 15th, 2018. 7:30 PM
Lory Student Center, Longs Peak
Rebecca Brown is the author of 12 books, published in the U.S. and abroad, including American Romances and Gifts of the Body, winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She has taught in colleges and universities for more than 30 years.
MFA Thesis Reading
November 1, 7:30 PM
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art
Readers: TBA
MFA Thesis Reading
November 29, 7:30 PM
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art
Readers: TBA
Old Firehouse Books Reading: Matthew Cooperman, Aby Kaupang and Laynie Browne
Please join us at 6pm on September 14 at Old Firehouse Books (232 Walnut Street) to hear poets Matthew Cooperman, Aby Kaupang and Laynie Browne read from new work.
We will be celebrating the release of Matthew Cooperman and Aby Kaupang’s collaborative book, NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified).
Poet Laynie Browne, who will be joining us from Philly, has several new books out, including The Book of Moments and You Envelope Me.
Rekindle the Classics
Rekindle the Classics was started by CSU English professor Ellen Brinks. As stated by Lynn Shutters, also a professor of English at CSU, “The basic idea behind the program is that a lot of people are curious about ‘classic’ literature, but might be a little intimidated by it, or might want someone with whom they can talk about it, or might just want to have a regular monthly meeting to encourage them to actually read that book. Rekindle the Classics is a program for those people.”
Graduate students and English department faculty choose classic works and facilitate open community discussions about the book. Rekindle meets once a month during the academic year, always at the Wolverine Farm Letterpress & Publick House.
Reading and Signing of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption By Susan Harness
This event is free and open to the public.
Friday, October 26 at 5 PM – 8 PM
Wolverine Farm Letterpress & Publick House
In Bitterroot Susan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.
Harness’s search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of “home” she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination.
Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterroot also provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.
Harness will be reading two 20 minute excerpts from her book followed by a book signing and reception. The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Department of English. This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to Katie.Horton@colostate.edu.
About the Author: Susan Harness (Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes) is a writer, lecturer, and oral historian, and has been a research associate for the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research at Colorado State University. Harness received her B.A. in anthropology from the University of Montana, her M.A. in cultural anthropology from Colorado State University in 2006, and her M.A. in creative nonfiction in 2016, also from Colorado State University. She is the author of Mixing Cultural Identities Through Transracial Adoption: Outcomes of the Indian Adoption Project (1958–1967).