Prior Events

Fall 2023

Gina Nutt

Thursday, November 3, 2022
5 p.m. 
Dowd Gallery, Dowd Fine Arts Center, Room 106

Gina Nutt is the author of the essay collection Night Rooms (Two Dollar Radio). She earned her MFA from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Forever Mag, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Asilia Franklin-Phipps

Van Burd Memorial Lecture: "Literacy at the End of the World"

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

4:00 p.m. 

Fireplace Lounge, Corey Union

Dr. Asilia Franklin-Phipps is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at SUNY New Paltz. She completed her PhD in 2017 at the University of Oregon in Critical Sociocultural Studies in Education. Drawing on a capacious range of disciplinary practices (including sociology of education, critical theory, literary studies, and writing studies), Franklin-Phipps’s work explores race, visual culture, affect and implications on pedagogy and education. Franklin-Phipps’s work has appeared in Cultural Studies <-->Critical Methodologies, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Girlhood Studies, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. In addition to her scholarly work, Franklin-Phipps also conducts workshops, gives public talks, and writes about pedagogy for a broad audience. 

Spring 2022

Donna Masini

Wednesday, April 20, 2022
5 p.m. 
Sperry Center, Mary L. Hobson ’61 Lecture Hall, Room 104 

Donna Masini is the author of three books of poems--4:30 Movie (W.W. Norton and Co., 2018, paper, 2020)), Turning to Fiction (Norton, 2004), That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994)--and a novel, About Yvonne (Norton,1998). Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Brooklyn Poets, Best American Poetry 2015.  A recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowship residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Bogliasco  and Yaddo, she is a Professor of English/Creative Writing at Hunter College, CUNY.  She lives in New York City.

Ann Kirschner

Wednesday, April 27, 2022
7 p.m. 
Sperry Center, Room 106

Ann Kirschner is the author of Sala's Gift and Lady at the OK Corral and a contributor to Forbes, where she writes about innovation in media, technology, and education. She is President of Comma Communications and University Professor at the City University of New York. A former senior executive of five start-ups including NFL.com, she serves on the board of directors of several companies and nonprofit organizations, including the Movado Group (MOV), Noodle, Strategic Cyber Ventures, Footsteps, NYC First, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation.

Fall 2022

Jordan S. Carroll

Van Burd Memorial Lecture: "Theory of the Obscene"

Thursday, November 4, 2021
4:30 p.m. 

Jordan S. Carroll is the author of Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford UP, 2021).

Cheryl Strayed

Tuesday, November 16, 2021
5 p.m. 

Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, and Tiny Beautiful Things.

Spring 2021

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is a doctoral candidate in the Literatures in English Department at Cornell University.

Distinguished Voices in Conversation: Hoxie Gorge Review

Chelsea Bunn, Brooke Champagne, Ashley M. Jones, and Silas Hansen

Fall 2019

Dr. Roya Biggie

Van Burd Memorial Lecture
Dr. Roya Biggie
"Race, Empire, and Plantlife on the Early Modern Stage"
Friday, Oct. 4, 2019 at 4 p.m.
Sperry Center, Room 106

Roya Biggie is Assistant Professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. Her teaching and research interests include early modern drama, botanical and medical texts, and travel narratives. Her work has appeared in Early Theatre, Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance, and Early Modern Literary Studies (forthcoming). Her book project, Ecology of the Passions in Early Modern Tragedies, uses affect theory and ecocriticism to analyze early modern conceptions of sympathy. 

Emily Fridlund

Reading by author Emily Fridlund
Monday, Nov. 18, 2019 at 5:00 P.M.
Brockway Hall, Jacobus Lounge

Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota. Her first novel, History of Wolves, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the International Dublin Literary Award. It was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Fridlund’s debut collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, New Orleans Review, Sou’wester, New Delta Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Southwest Review. She currently teaches writing at Cornell University.

Spring 2019

Sapphire

Reading by author Sapphire
Thursday, April 4, 2019, 5:00pm
Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Sapphire is the author of two bestselling novels, Push and The Kid. Push was adapted into the Academy Award-winning major motion film Precious, which received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress. Sapphire is also the author of two collections of poetry: American Dreams, and Black Wings & Blind Angels. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The Black Scholar, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Teacher’s Voice, The New Yorker, Spin, and Bomb.

Dr. Frances Botkin

Lecture by Dr. Frances Botkin
Friday, April 26, 2019, 5:00pm
Sperry Center Room 106

Dr. Botkin is the author of Thieving Three Fingered Jack: TransAtlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015. She was trained in British Romanticism at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently she works in TransAtlantic Studies, specifically exploring the dynamics among self-emancipated blacks and the colonial police state in Jamaica. As a result, her approach to teaching British Romanticism has acquired a global register. While completing her book about the escaped slave rebel, Three-Fingered Jack, she started work on a collection of essays, From the Abeng to the Book: Studies in Matronage and Indigeneity. This collection has emerged out of her work with the Maroons of Jamaica and Suriname in the organization of the Charles Town International Conference on Maroons and Indigenous People (from 2009-the present). She teaches at Towson University.

Fall 2018

Elissa Washuta

Reading by author Elissa Washuta
Wednesday, October 17, 2018, 5:30pm
Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a writer of personal essays and memoir. She is the author of two books, Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction, forthcoming from University of Washington Press. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Potlatch Fund, and Hugo House. Elissa is an assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University.

Chen Chen

Reading by Poet Chen Chen
Tuesday, October 30, 2018, 5:00pm
Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. The collection was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and named one of the best of 2017 by The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Library Journal, and others. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Chen earned his MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing as an off-site Texas Tech University student. He lives in frequently snowy Rochester, NY with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles. Chen is the 2018-2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

John Havard

Van Burd Memorial Lecture by Dr. John Havard
Wednesday, November 7, 2018, 5:00pm
Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

John Havard is the author of Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760–1830, forthcoming next year from Oxford University Press. He studied in the U.K., at the University of Virginia, and at the University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D. in 2013. He is author of articles in ELH, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, The Nineteenth Century and Contemporary Literature on writers including Laurence Sterne, Mary Shelley, and Edward St. Aubyn. His current work includes a book on literary and political rhetoric about the end of the world in the writings of Byron and Mary Shelley and continuing work on political disaffection and cynicism. 

Spring 2018

Laurie Gries

“Swastika Monitoring: Developing Digital Research Tools to Track Visual Rhetorics of Hate”
Monday, March 26, 2018, 5:00pm
Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Laurie Gries (PhD, Syracuse University) is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research is invested in visual rhetoric, circulation studies, new materialism, and the digital humanities. She is particularly interested in how images circulate, transform, and contribute to collective life and is currently developing digital research methods and digital visualization techniques to support such research. In addition to acting as the managing editor of enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, she is author of Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, which won the 2016 CCCC Research Impact Award and the 2016 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award, and the forthcoming co-edited collection Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric.

Christine Kitano

Reading by Poet Christine Kitano
Thursday, April 5, 2018, 5:00pm
Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Sky Country (BOA Editions, 2017) and Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press, 2011). Recent work is published in Portland Review, Miramar, and Wildness. She teaches at Ithaca College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Bob Proehl

Reading by Author Bob Proehl
Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 5:00pm
Corey Union Exhibition Lounge

Bob Proehl is the author of the novel A Hundred Thousand Worlds (Penguin). He grew up in Buffalo, New York, where his local comics shop was Queen City Bookstore. He has worked as a bookseller and programming director for Buffalo Street Books, a DJ, a record store owner, and a bartender. He was a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction and a 2013 resident at the Saltonstall Arts Colony. He has written for the 33⅓ book series and worked as a columnist and reviewer for the arts and culture site PopMatters.com. Proehl currently lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, stepson, and daughter.

Fall 2017

Amber Jamilla Musser

Van Burd Memorial Lecture by Amber Jamilla Musser, Ph.D.

Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017, 5:15 p.m., Sperry Center Hobson '61 Lecture Hall, Room 104

Amber Jamilla Musser is associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her monograph, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014) uses masochism as a lens to theorize different felt relationships to power. Musser has also published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of color critique. Her current research project, "Brown Jouissance: Feminine Imaginings" uses women of color's aesthetic labors to re-imagine epistemologies of sexuality so that they center brown femininity. She has an M.S. in Women's Studies from Oxford University and received her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University.

Jericho Brown

Reading by poet Jericho Brown

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2017, 5 p.m., Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University.

Jamiee Wriston Colbert

Reading by author Jaimee Wriston Colbert

Thursday, Oct. 26, 2017, 4 p.m., Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of five books: the linked story collection Wild Things; Shark Girls, Finalist for the USA Book News Best Books of 2010 Awards; Dream Lives of Butterflies, winner of the gold medal in the Independent Publisher Awards; Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize, and Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Prize. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner and TriQuarterly, and broadcast on Selected Shorts. She is professor of English and creative writing at Binghamton University.

Spring 2017

Eleanor Henderson

Reading by author Eleanor Henderson
Wednesday, March 8, 2017, 6 p.m., Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Eleanor Henderson's debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times and a finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from The Los Angeles Times. Her short stories have appeared in Agni, North American Review, Ninth Letter, Columbia, Salon, and The Best American Short Stories. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, All Things Considered, Poets & Writers, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. With Anna Solomon she is also co-editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers (FSG, 2014). Her second novel, The Twelve-Mile Straight, will be published by Ecco this Fall.

Amy Monticello

Reading by essayist Amy Monticello
Thursday, April 6, 2017 5 p.m., Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Amy Monticello’s work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Phoebe, The Rumpus, Salon, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Close Quarters, was published by Sweet Publications, and her nonfiction has been listed as notable in Best American Essays. She is a regular contributor at Role/Reboot, where she writes about contemporary gender issues, parenting, and politics. She is the winner of the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize in Nonfiction for her collection, How to Euthanize a Horse, which is forthcoming.

Fall 2016

Nick Salvato

Van Burd Memorial Lecture in Literary Criticism by Nick Salvato, Ph.D.
Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016, 4:30 p.m., Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

In a variety of ways and contexts, Nick Salvato focuses attention on performances, representational practices, discourses, and dispositions that are figured (often dismissively) by critics as minor or that announce themselves deliberately as minor; and at the same time, he considers the ways in which the concept of minority influences or defines the modern, even as minority conceals the centrality of its definitional power and influence.

Camille Rankine

Reading by poet Camille Rankine
Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016, 5 p.m., Brockway Hall Jacobus Lounge

Camille Rankine's first full-length collection of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses was published by Copper Canyon Press in January 2016. She is also the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. She has been the recipient of a 2010 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a finalist for The Poetry Foundation's 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.

Spring 2016

Ethan Young

A Conversation with Ethan Young, Graphic Novelist and Illustrator
Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Ethan Young is an illustrator, graphic novelist, and the author of Nanjing: The Burning City (2015, Dark Horse Comics). Nanjing delves into World War II’s forgotten tragedy, the devastating Japanese invasion of Nanjing, and in beautiful black-and-white illustrations, it tells a heart-wrenching tale of war, loss, and defiance.

Fall 2015

Michael D. Snediker, Poet and Queer Theorist

On April 21, 2015, Michael D. Snediker, Ph.D. (University of Houston) gave a reading from his Lambda-Nominated poetry collection, The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum, 2013) and his forthcoming work, The New York Editions, which translates Henry James's novels into lyric poems.