Events

Westminster College is the home of the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series, one of the best-endowed poetry reading series in the country, curated by Ellipsis advisor Natasha Sajé. Our visiting writers meet with Ellipsis editors and creative writing students in addition to giving public performances of their work.

The Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series

Thanks to the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks endowment, Westminster College presents its 21st annual poetry reading series in 2009–2010. For more information, please contact Natasha Sajé, associate professor of English and director of the series, at 801.832.2376 or nsaje@westminstercollege.edu. Please note that all campus readings begin at 7:00 pm and are followed by receptions and book signings.

Anne Carson: Thursday, September 17, 2009

Vieve Gore Concert Hall, Jewett Center for the Performing Arts

Canadian-born Anne Carson has consistently won acclaim for her unusual books, including Glass, Irony and God; Plainwater: Essays and Poetry; Autobiography of Red; The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos; and Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Book Review writes that Carson's writing is "unclassifiable, even by today's motley, genre-bending standards."

Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of Greek plays, as well as If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Carson's erudition is always infused with feeling, and often with humor. her work is highly intimate at the same time that it refers to other literature and art.

Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur "Genius" Award. She now teaches at New York University.

Edwin Torres: Friday, October 23, 2009

Vieve Gore Concert Hall, Jewett Center for the Performing Arts

Born in 1965 in New York of Puerto Rican parents, Edwin Torres started creating (often bilingual) text and performance work in 1988. Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including others at the Nuyorican Poets Café, mingling poetry with vocal/physical improvisation, visual theater, music and sound.

Poet and Reviewer Kenneth Goldsmith in A Popular Guide to Unpopular Music says of Torres' work: "Holy Kid straddles a position somewhere between Finnegans Wake and I Love Lucy. It's Gertrude Stein drunk on tequila. It's Jerry Lewis reciting the Ursonate. It's William Carlos Williams fronting a psychedelic band at the Fillmore East. It's Q-Tip as King Lear. It reconciles the diametrically opposed poetic agendas of the Nuyorican Café and Language Poetry, creating a type of sound poetry sure to interest both groups."

Saturday, October 24

Utah Humanities Book Festival, Salt Lake City main Library, 210 East 400 South

Please visit www.utahhumanities.org/BookFestival for the schedule of events. Edwin Torres will work with selected high school students.

Community Workshop: The Lyric Essay
Instructor: Andrea Hollander Budy

Mondays, 4:30-7:20, January 11th - April 26th, 2010

Not quite a poem and not quite an essay, or both a poem and an essay? The lyric essay combines elements of both genres. According to practitioner Brenda Miller, editor of The Bellingham Review, "the lyric essay refuses precise categorization but rather relies on a spirit of playfulness that allows it to straddle many different literary borders." In this course we will attempt to define the genre for ourselves not only by reading essays and what other have to say about the craft of nonfiction writing, but also (of course) by creating our own essays.

Andrea Hollander Budy is the author of three books of poems. Woman in the Painting, The Other Life, and House Without a Dreamer, which won the Nicholas Roerich Peotry Prize. Reviewer John Bradley has remarked, "There's a clarity to her poems that can take your breath away. This is not to be confused with reductive simplicity; her poems often take unusual turns and delve into areas of great emotional complexity." Other honors include two poetry fellowships, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Subiaco Award for Literary Merit for Excellence in the Writing and Teaching of Poetry. Budy has also edited When She Named Fire: An Analogy of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009). For the past seventeen years she has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

To be considered for this free workshop, please mail a nonfiction writing sample of up to 20 pages, and contact information (phone, email, address) to Natasha Sajé, English Department, Westminster College, 1840 South 1300 East, Salt Lake City, UT, 84105 by October 15. Participants will be notified by December 1.

ELLIPSIS DEBUT

Friday April 23, 2010: Dumke Black Box Theatre, Westminster College