Beck Lecture Series - Spring 2010
Visiting Writers
Barney-Davis Board Room
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Giving Voice Productions • Hook-ups and Hang-ups: College Students Speak Out
February 13 • 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.
Burke Hall
Co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies and Resource Center, Laura C. Harris Symposium, English Department, Theatre Department, Vail Arts Series, Residential Life, A O D and Health Education
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Antonya Nelson • Fiction Writer
March 2 • 8:00 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
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Katy Lederer and Martha Moody • Poet and Novelist
March 30 • 4:00 p.m.
Panel Discussion on Writing and Other Careers
Barney-Davis Board Room
Katy Lederer • Poet
March 30 • 8:00 p.m.
Poetry Reading
Barney-Davis Board Room
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Lisa Suhair Majaj • Plaestinian-American Poet and Scholar
April 6 • 4:30 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
Co-sponsored by the Laura C. Harris Symposium, Global Studies and International Studies
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***CONVOCATION***
Michael Pollan
**Consumption Series**
Co-sponsored by the MacGregor Initiatives Fund
Biographies
Aracelis Girmay, the winner of the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for poetry, will read from her latest work, Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). Girmay, raised in southern California, is the inheritor of Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African American traditions, and writes poetry, essays, and fiction. She holds a B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University. Her children's art book, Changing, Changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. A former Watson fellow and Cave Canem fellow, she has published extensively in journals and literary magazines. Girmay is on the faculty of Drew University's low residency M.F.A. Program. She also leads community writing workshops in New York.
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Giving Voice Productions
Transcribed from interviews with college students, Hook-ups and Hang-ups: College Students Speak Out, is an edgy and brave look at the private thoughts, fears, and triumphs of young adults. Giving Voice Productions has created an original production in collaboration with Denison students. This new play deals with socially relevant topics such as: dating, sexual relationships, self-esteem, party pressures, drinking and drugs, identity, body issues and other relevant topics suggested by the students. Giving Voice Productions is known for its original award-winning productions, Power to Pleasing: The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls and Pressure to Prove: The Sex Lives of Teenage Boys. Past productions have been called transformative and riveting. Giving Voice Productions is creating an important dialogue, with challenging material, to generate experimental, provocative and action-provoking theatre. Please join us for a conversation directly following each performance.
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Antonya Nelson teaches at the University of Houston, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing. Her first story collection, The Expendables, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990. She is the author of five other short story collections, including Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009), and three novels: Talking in Bed (winner of the Heartland Prize), Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Rea Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and many literary journals, as well as in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry: Prize Stories anthologies. In addition, she is a Writer at Large for Texas Monthly magazine.
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Poet Katy Lederer will read from her recent work. Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008), as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003).
Novelist Martha Moody and poet Katy Lederer will participate in a panel discussion on writing and other careers. Lederer was a VP at a New York City hedge fund before turning to writing full time. Moody practiced internal medicine for 15 years before becoming a novelist. Margot Singer, who was a partner with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company before coming to Denison, will moderate.
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Lisa Suhair Majaj is a Palestinian-American poet and scholar. Born in the United States, Majaj was raised in Jordan, and earned university degrees in Lebanon and the United States. Her poetry and essays have been widely published. In 2007, she was awarded the Del Sol Press Annual Poetry Prize for her poetry manuscript Geographies of Light.
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Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, winner of the James Beard Award, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. A young readers’ version The Omnivore's Dilemma: the Secrets Behind What You Eat is now available. Pollan's new book Food Rules will be available in January. Previous books include Second Nature, The Botany of Desire, and A Place of My Own, pictured here. Pollan appears in Food, Inc. a documentary on the food industry, and The Botany of Desire, recently broadcast on PBS. Pollan is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.