Upcoming Events: Visiting Writers (Spring, 2007)
Billy Collins: March 29-30, 2007
Reading: Thursday, March 29, Weber Center, 7:30 p.m. (St. John's Prep)
Tickets to this event will be required
Tickets to this event are free and space is limited. Please pick-up tickets in advance up until the day of the event at Saint John's Preparatory School or reserve by emailing Mritter@csbsju.edu or calling (320) 363-3317 or 1-800-525-7737 (limit two tickets per person).
Former poet laureate, bestselling contemporary poet in America and huge crowd favorite, is the first Project Logos speaker in the new Prep School version of Project Logos. Collins will give a craft talk on March 29 from 3:00-4:15 in the Alumni Lounge at SJU. If you'd like to attend, please contact Mark Conway (mconway@csbsju.edu).
Anne Carson: April 20, 2007, Instrumental Rehearsal Room, BAC, 7:30 p.m. (CSB)
Poet and classicist Anne Carson will stage a performance piece including a video featuring three members of the Merce Cunningham Dance troupe on Friday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m. in the Instrumental Rehearsal Room at the BAC.
Donald Hall: April 24, 2007
Reading: Tuesday, April 24, Alumnae Hall, 7:30 p.m. (CSB)
Hall, the current U.S. Laureate, will visit CSB on April 24.
Recent Visits (2006-2007)
Charles Simic: November 14-17, 2006
Reading: November 16, 7:30 p.m., Pellegrene Auditorium, SJU
Winner of the Griffin Prize for Selected Poems 1963-2003 (Faber and Faber)
Sponsored by Chair of Critical Thinking and Project Logos/Literary Arts Institute
From the Griffin Trust website:
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has published five books of essays, a memoir, numerous translations and sixteen collections of poetry. Born in 1938 in Belgrade Yugoslavia, Simic immigrated to the United States in 1952 and saw his first poems published in 1959. In 1961 he was drafted into the US Army and in 1966 earned his Bachelor’s degree at New York University, publishing his first full-length collection of poems What the Grass Says in 1967. Since then he has published more than 60 books in the United States including My Noiseless Entourage (2005), Jackstraws (Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times 1999), Walking the Black Cat (finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry 1996), A Wedding in Hell (1994), Hotel Insomnia (1992), The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (for which he received the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1990), Selected Poems: 1963 - 1983 (1990), and Unending Blues (1986). He has also published many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian and Slovenian poetry and has twice won the Pen International Translation Award.
Amongst his many accomplishments and accolades, Simic was the Guest Editor of The Best American Poetry 1992, was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000 and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1973, Simic has lived in New Hampshire where he is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.
For audio and video clips, visit the Griffin Trust website
My Noiseless Entourage: Publishers Weekly review (January 24, 2005)
Over the past three decades, Simic's compact, often spooky poems of displacement, violence and anxiety have won him national acclaim (and a Pulitzer); for some readers, Simic's frightened children, intrepid shopkeepers and bleak fairy-tale atmospheres mark his work as late-blooming surrealism, while others link his sensibility to the violence he escaped as a child in 1940s Serbia. Simic offers many sinister delights, if few big shockers, in this 14th volume of new work: of its four sections, the first two stick largely to the grittily familiar Simic settings: "All-night cafeterias,/ Dark barrooms/ And poolhalls," not to mention "an empty platform/ With no town in sight." Short, bleary lines alternate streamlined realism with dreamlike gloom: "A tongue by itself in a birdcage" begs for water, while a walker explores "A few homes lately foreclosed." The last (and best) parts of the book expand Simic's repertoire of images, moving from film noir scenes into bizarre parables: "that world out there," the poet shows, "Is a riddle even you can't solve." Helpless, baffled, resigned and nevertheless charming, Simic (Hotel Insomnia ; etc.) makes up for his limited range by offering verse with almost no false notes; standout poems attack war or mull the absence of God ("the least he could do is put up a sign"), and the whole collection establishes Simic once again as a reliable master of his particular, melancholy, wry mode. (Apr.)
Nuruddin Farah: February 5 - 8, 2007
Panel: "Politics and Religion in East Africa," 7:30 p.m., Mary Commons (CSB)
Nuruddin Farah, Noreen Herzfeld, Gar Kellom and Fred de Sam Lazaro will discuss politics and religion in East Africa.
Reading: Wednesday, February 7, 7:30 p.m., Alumnae Hall (CSB)
S. Mariella Gable Prize
From Graywolf Press:
Nuruddin Farah is an internationally recognized author and a winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He was born in 1945 in Baidoa, in what is now the Republic of Somalia. In 1991, he received the Swedish Tucholsky Literary Award, given to literary exiles, and he was the recipient of the German DAAD fellowship in 1990.
Trilogy: Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship
“In this trilogy Nuruddin Farah takes us deep into territory he has charted and mapped and made uniquely his own. . . . [He] excels in giving voice to tragedy in remote places of the worold that speak directly and familiarly to our own hearts.” ---Chinua Achebe
Sweet and Sour Milk:
Winner of the 1980 English-Speaking Union Literary
Award
Sweet and Sour Milk chronicles a man's search for the reasons behind his
twin brother's violent death during the 1970s. The atmosphere of political
tyranny and repression reduces his quest to a passive and fatalistic level, and
the book progresses largely on an inner plane. (cover)
Sardines: Winner of the
Neustadt International Prize for Literature
In Sardines, a woman loses her job as editor of the national newspaper
and finds her efforts to instill her daughter with a sense of dignity and
independence threatened by an oppressive government and the traditions of
conservative Islam. This book brilliantly combines a social commentary on life
under a dictatorship with a compassionate exploration of African
feminist issues. (cover)
“Mr. Farah has given us a powerful political statement that moves constantly toward song."—The New York Times Book Review
Close Sesame
In Close Sesame, the characters are deeply entwined in the waking nightmare of a police state. An old man finds himself poised in mortal combat with an elusive and cunning enemy in an atmosphere where the distinction between public and private justice is obscured.
"So articulate a...voice deserves to be listened to, particularly as he writes like a novelist rather than a preacher."—The Guardian (London)