WesPress x Shapiro
Wesleyan University Press is one of the world’s outstanding publishers of contemporary poetry. The Press has garnered national and international accolades for its work, including six Pulitzer Prizes, three National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three Griffin Poetry Prizes, and an Anisfield-Wolf Award, among many others. Its authors include John Cage, Norman O. Brown, M.C. Richards, Samuel R. Delany, Joy Harjo, James Wright, James Tate, Peter Gizzi, Brenda Hillman, Rae Armantrout, Yusef Komunyakaa, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sally Banes, Ralph Lemon, and Tricia Rose.
The WesPress x Shapiro series celebrates recent publications by the press’s authors through evenings of readings and conversation. All events are free and open to the public.
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Heather Christle, Monday, February 2nd at 5 pm
Heather Christle is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Paper Crown. Her second book of poems, The Trees The Trees, won the Believer Book Award for Poetry, and was adapted into a ballet. Christle is also the author of two works of nonfiction: In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, and The Crying Book, which has been translated into eight languages and adapted for radio by the BBC. She teaches at Emory University, where she is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing.
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Juliana Spahr, Thursday, October 16th at 6 pm
Juliana Spahr is a writer and scholar of literature. Her most recent book of poetry, That Winter the Wolf Came, takes as its concern the global spread of political struggles located at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. She also publishes literary prose. Highly fictionalized but still probably memoir, Army of Lovers was cowritten with David Buuck and tells the story of two mediocre poets who are attempting to write poetry in a time when poetry’s importance is on the decline. Her most recent book of scholarship, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, explores the ambiguous and disconcerting role that literature plays in upholding the modern nation-state. She was also the editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Women Poets in the 21st Century.
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