CONGRATS, PROFESSOR HAHN

Two reasons to celebrate:

Professor Kimiko Hahn has been awarded this year's PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry!

The PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, established by a bequest from Hunce Voelcker, will be presented for the eighth time in 2008. The award is given to a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work to date represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature. The poet honored by the award is one for whom the exceptional promise seen in earlier work has been fulfilled, and who continues to mature with each successive volume of poetry. The award is given in even-numbered years and carries a stipend of $5,000.

Also, check this out: Tribeba Film Festival premiere's Everywhere at Once, a film by Peter Lindbergh and Holly Fisher

With Jeanne Moreau
Text by Kimiko Hahn
Music by Lois V Vierk

Public Screenings:
Sunday, April 27, 9:00 pm, AMC 19th St. East, II
Wednesday, April 30, 10:45 pm, AMC Village VII
Thursday, May 1, 1:15 pm, Village East Cinema 3
Sunday, May 4, 7:15 pm, Village East Cinema 6

35 mm – B & W and Color – 73 minutes

From the start this project was realized intuitively, made on a handshake between internationally-acclaimed photographer Peter Lindbergh and experimental filmmaker Holly Fisher. Poet Kimiko Hahn was recruited to provide the text, based on Lindbergh’s celebrity photographs. The team soon set to work, commencing production with the loose dream-narrative drafted by Hahn and the prospect of music by composer Lois V Vierk. When Lindbergh proposed that Jeanne Moreau might agree to read the text, a light went off in Fisher’s head: having worked with archival material in the past, she saw the possibility of using sound and picture ‘shards’ from ‘Mademoiselle.’ Every visual element was treated as an archeological find in the portrayal of an unseen protagonist, mysterious and ageless. The resulting film, intimate journal-like entries recited by Moreau, is personal yet universal and at times quite dark. Above all, it is a celebration of images.

Ozone Park: The Debut!

Attention, writers!

OZONE PARK, the new and exciting literary journal of the Queens College MFA program is live! Check it out!

Tayari Jones: Weekend Extra

A few months ago, I wrote an essay that looked at the African American sections in bookstores like Borders. When I wrote it, just weeks before the publication of my second novel, The Untelling, I believed that these segregated sections were likely the only way that African American authors would reach the readers that are willing (and even eager!) to purchase our books.

I cited such anecdotal evidence as the listing on Amazon, which suggested that people who purchased my books also purchased other books, not just by black authors, but by black female authors. It seemed that even online, where there are no “sections,” people who looked at my books did so because they like books by black authors. No color blindness there. Then I looked up a couple of books by my white authors, and on their Amazon pages I saw that their readers had also bought books by other white authors. It seemed to me that this was an open and shut case.

Tayari Jones: Day Five

A few months ago, before the media coverage of Clinton/Obama contest pressured black women to decide if we are "women" before we are "black," I sat beside a black man on an airplane. Since such close quarters lend themselves to small talk, he asked me what I do for a living.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “What do you write? Romances?”
“Nope.”
He gave me a sideways glance. “So you have a problem with men?”
Though I was completely aware of the inanity of his question—of both his questions—I found myself working hard to allay his fears. “Oh no,” I said. “I have no problem with brothers!” Once I had disembarked from the plane, claimed my bags, and settled myself in a taxi cab, I recalled my own voice, treakly sweet with an edge of desperation.
What the hell was that all about?

Tayari Jones: Day Four

Publicity is a weird thing for writers. I’ve just come back from the second book tour of my career. The first time, in 2002, I went out on the road to promote Leaving Atlanta, a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the Atlanta Child Murders. My publisher, Warner Books, decided to package me as a “southern” writer. For the last couple of months, I’ve been on the road with The Untelling, another novel set in Atlanta. But this go round, I’m doing it as a “black” writer. I know that we are a nation that strives for color-blindness, so it seems sort of inherently offensive to label a writer as “black”. But this is what happened to me, and I have to tell you that, for the most part, it wasn’t so bad. Especially when you compare it to my book tour as a “southern” writer.

Writing Fantasy, Writing New York

Delia Sherman
Thursday, April 10
5:30-7:00
Delia Sherman's most recent short stories have appeared in the Viking young adult anthologies The Green Man, Fairy Reel, and Coyote Road. Her adult novels are Through a Brazen Mirror and The Porcelain Dove (which won the Mythopoeic Award), and, with fellow-fantasist and partner Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. She has co-edited anthologies with Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling. Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited with Theodora Goss, came out in 2007. Her first novel for younger readers, Changeling, was published in 2006. She is a past member of the James Tiptree Jr. Awards Council, an active member of the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts, and a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation board. Delia has taught writing at Clarion, the Odyssey Workshop in New Hampshire, the Cape Cod Writers' Workshop, and the American Book Center in Amsterdam. She lives in New York city, and writes wherever she happens to find herself

Anthologies, an editor’s pov

Harold Schechter
Wednesday, April 9th
6:30-8:00
Klapper Hall, 7th floor
Harold Schechter, QC professor and author of over thirty books, is also the co-editor of the exquisite everyman/knopf volume, Conversation Pieces: poems that talk to other poems. He will visit a course that is based on this text, speak about the anthology’s inception, as well as answer questions/offer advice about editing anthologies. Aside from editing this volume and various textbooks, he has just completed a ground-breaking anthology of true crime for the library of America (forthcoming, fall 2008).

Tayari Jones: Day Three

The glory of the first novel—for most people—is that it is a piece written without the input of publishers, agents, or any other market-driven forces. During the three years I spent working on Leaving Atlanta, I had an idea to write a triple-voiced coming of age narrative based on my experiences growing up in Atlanta during the child murders. The middle section of the novel is written entirely in the second person using a sort of elevated diction. Not exactly the expected fare in a story with an eleven year old protagonist. But the beauty of the first novel is that I didn’t know that publishers were often afraid to commit to something new and untested. I had no idea that my first agent would kick me to the curb for refusing the try and sell the novel as a YA project. Who knew that twenty-two publishers would be weirded out by the middle section- the one with the big words freaky POV? Not me.

Trauma and Memoir: A Multi-Genre Response

Friday, April 11, 2008, 6:30 –8:30 p.m.

MIDDLE EAST & MIDDLE EASTERN AMERICAN CENTER
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Room 9204/5, 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)

How is trauma remembered? How is it passed on to future generations? What role can memoir writers play in bearing witness to trauma? This panel explores the ways three women authors have recorded stories of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust.

ALEX HINTON (moderator) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, Newark. His publications include Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide and Genocide: An Anthropological Reader.

ANTONIA ARLAN (panelist)is professor of Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature at Padua University, Italy. La masseria delle allodole is her first novel, chronicling her ancestors’ fate Anatolia after 1915. The famous cinematographers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have turned it into a movie by the same name.

MARGARET AHNERT (panelist) grew up in New York City and received her MFA from Goucher College. She has produced television documentaries and lectured as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the author of The Knock on the Door: A Journey through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide, which recounts her mother’s experiences of the forced deportations and Armenian Genocide.

CATHERINE FILLOUX (panelist), an award-winning playwright, has been writing about genocide, human rights, and social justice for the past twenty years; honors include PeaceWriting Award (Omni Center for Peace), Roger L. Stevens Award (Kennedy Center), Eric Kocher Playwrights Award (O'Neill) and Callaway Award (New Dramatists). Her plays have been published produced internationally. She has also written the libretti for two produced operas. She is a co-founder of Theatre Without Borders.

Tayari Jones: Day Two

The invitations start around Thanksgiving: Greetings, Ms. Jones! I am events coordinator for the Mayberry Public Library and we are delighted to invite you to be our Black History Month speaker! About ten years ago, when I was struggling to make a name for myself as a writer, I greeted these requests with an uncomplicated delight: my handful of short stories and essays had reached an audience and had earned me a place not just as a spokesperson on black history but as example of black excellence. These invitations usually came without honoraria and I often shared the docket with three or four other “emerging” writers. Some of my peers who are not black writers grumbled a bit about the idea that I could score invitations “just” for being black. And I must admit that at that stage of my life, I did think of this as lagniappe, just a tiny leg up. Since then, I have published two novels and have begun to chafe a bit at these invitations. Like many black writers, my schedule is frequently packed during February, but comparatively lean during the rest of the year. If February is Black History Month, is the rest of the calendar reserved for white people?