Archive for August 24th, 2019
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
African Diaspora – New Dialogues
Thursday, October 24th at 7:00 p.m.
South Dallas Cultural Center
3400 S. Fitzhugh Dallas, TX 75210
Hosted by Sanderia Faye
WordSpace is proud to partner with the South Dallas Cultural Center to produce the 6th season of African Diaspora – New Dialogues Series.
“My writing is wide-ranging and concerns the malleability of language and forms. I am interested in the intersections of the innovative and experimental with aspects race, gender, and the more-than-human world. My work is ground in inquiry, ways of knowing, and how language can (and cannot) communicate experiences felt in body and mind. Even at its most cerebral my work is centered in notions of embodiment and the lived experience of seeing and being seen. My practice and process includes photographic and video work and mixed media composition. Current projects include computational poetics and emerging technologies, spell-casting, and collaborative writing.” – Lillian-Yvonne Bertram describes her work. Courtesy of Jack Jones Literary Arts.
Sanderia Faye serves on the faculty at Southern Methodist University, is an instructor at the 2017 Desert Nights Rising Stars Conference at Arizona State University, and a professional speaker and activist. Her novel, Mourner’s Bench, is the winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in debut fiction and The Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit for fiction. She is co-founder and a fellow at Kimbilio Center for Fiction, and her work has appeared in the anthology Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas. Faye moderated the grassroots panel for the
Arkansas Civil Rights Symposium during the Freedom Riders 50th Anniversary and is coordinating the first AWP African Diaspora Caucus.
Her work received “Best Of” honors at the 2011 Eckerd College Writers’ Conference, Co-Directors Dennis Lehane and Sterling Watson, where her winning excerpt from the novel was published in SABAL Literary Journal. She received grants and scholarships offers from Hurston/Wright Writers Conference, Eckerd College Writers’ in Paradise Conference, Callaloo Writers Workshop, and Vermont, Writers Studio. She attended The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency.
She holds an MFA from Arizona State University, a MA from the University of Texas at Dallas, a BS in Accounting from the University of Arkansas. She is currently a PhD student in English at the University of North Texas.
African Diaspora-New Dialogues is in its 6th official season. It was unofficially kicked off in 2013 with Nikki Giovanni. The past five seasons have featured distinguished writers such as Duriel Harris, Vievee Francis, Tyehimba Jess, Roger Reeves, Dawn Lundy Martin, Chris Abani, Tim Seibles, Mitchell Jackson, Douglas Kearney, Tina McElroy Ansa, Walter Mosley, Lonnie Holley and Nicole Dennis-Benn.
About South Dallas Cultural Center: The South Dallas Cultural Center (SDCC) is a City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs owned community center with a wide variety of programs inspired by the vibrancy and diversity of the African Diaspora. The SDCC seeks to educate and inspire through the visual, media, literary and performing arts. SDCC has presented some of the most dynamic visual and performing arts in Dallas. Retired Manager Vicki Meek’s decades of service to promote art and racial equity have profoundly influenced the cultural life of Dallas and the development of a whole new generation of African American artists. She is the co-developer of The Institute for Creative Investigation in Puerta Viejo, Costa Rica; Board Chair of Friends of the South Dallas Cultural Center; serves on the Advisory Board of WordSpace and co-founder of African Diaspora–New Dialogues with Karen Minzer and Dee Mitchell of WordSpace. Marilyn Clark, SDCC’s Education Director arranges special DISD school visits for the visiting writers of this series.
The Work of Robert Pinsky
A Martha Heimberg Salon!
RSVP for address HERE or write wordspace@wordspace.us
ABOUT MARTHA:
Former long-time WordSpace Board Member Martha Heimberg facilitates an evening of analytical review and comparative investigations of works by Robert Pinsky. All with her inimitable warm hospitality and refreshments provided by WordSpace.
Martha Heimberg has been writing about theater, the arts and historic preservation for over 40 years for numerous Texas newspapers and magazines, including, D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and The Texas Tribune. She currently is a contributing theater critic and arts writer for Theater Jones and Dallas Weekly, and is a member of the American Theater Critics Association. She has won multiple awards from the Dallas Press Club and the Texas Historic Commission and is a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum, WordSpace, and the Historic Preservation League (now Preservation Dallas). Founder and coordinator of DART’s Poetry in Motion program, she currently serves on the board of directors of Junius Heights Historic District Association and Friends of Aldredge House. Her degrees in English and comparative literature are from Southern Methodist University. For over 40 years, she taught English and creative studies at Richland College, Southern Methodist University and Northwood University. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015, and now teaches a twice-weekly adult literacy class at Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT). She’s also a messy and ardent amateur painter, printer and potter.
ABOUT POET ROBERT PINSKY:
Robert Pinsky received a BA from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an MA and PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters.
He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Gulf Music: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2007); Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).
He is also the author of several prose titles, including Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters (W. W. Norton, 2013);The Life of David (Schocken, 2006); Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry(1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.
Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass).
About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, “Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician’s dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions.”
From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in Americans’ lives.
In 1999, he co-edited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).
His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.
Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He served as a Chancellor for The Academy of American Poets from 2004 to 2010. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
V.P. CROWE at Poets on X +
V.P. Crowe
What: Poets on X+ Feature Reading Series and Open Mic
When: Friday, September 13, 7:00 p.m.
Where: Mighty Fine Arts Gallery, 409A N. Tyler St. Dallas, TX 75214
Hosted by: Opalina and Carlos Salas
V. P. Crowe stumbled on the Dallas poetry scene waaay back when there wasn’t much more to it than Joe Stanco’s Poets Roundtable and Chumley’s open mic night down in Deep Ellum, and the Dallas poetry scene hasn’t quite been able to shake her loose since. Her work has appeared most recently at thewildword.com and as part of The Writer’s Garret’s 2018 Common Language Project. She lives in the suburbs with a mad scientist and a houseful of fur, and tends to only write when a thing takes her by the throat and won’t let go.
Link to VP Crowe’s poetry published in The Wild Word
