[Wgcp-whc] Rankine this week (reading and visit); Zawacki soon

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Fellow Poeticians,

just a reminder that we will be meeting this Friday from 3-5 PM in room 116 of
the Whitney Humanities Center.  We will be continuing our discussion of the
work of Claudia Rankine.  Rankine will be joining us for that session, which
promises to be generative and provocative. Feel free to recommend this session
to anyone who might be interested--we are always free and open to everyone.

Rankine will be reading the night before and I'll paste that information below.
Also, for our last two sessions of the semester, we will be reading Andrew
Zawacki's most recent book of poems, Petals of Zero, Petals of One.  Copies of
that are now available in rm 116 of WHC.  These are free to members of the
group.  We just ask that you only take one if you think that you'll make at
least one of the sessions.  I'll offer a fuller sense of Zawacki soon, but for
now I'll just present the "official" bio of this compelling and fascinating
poet/translator:


Andrew Zawacki is the author of three poetry books--Petals of Zero Petals of One
(Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings
(Georgia)--and of several chapbooks: Georgia (Katalanché), co-winner of the
1913 Prize; Glassscape (Projective Industries); Lumièrethèque (Blue Hour);
Arrow?s shadow (Equipage); Videotape (Particular); Roche limit (tir aux
pigeons); Bartleby?s Waste-book (PS); and Masquerade (Vagabond), which
received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America.
His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, and
elsewhere, including the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the
New Century (Sarabande), Walt Whitman hom(m)age, 2005/1855 (Turtle Point), The
Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (Iowa), and Great American Prose Poems:
>From Poe to the Present (Scribner). Translated into French by Sika Fakambi,
Georgia recently appeared from Éditions de l?Attente, and Par raison de
brisants is forthcoming, in French translation by Antoine Cazé, from Éditions
Grèges. A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers? Association and the
recipient of a Slovenian Ministry of Culture Translation Grant, Zawacki has
edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and Ale?
Debeljak?s new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia (Persea). His
translation from the French of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming
from Burning Deck. Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews
(Verse), he has published criticism in the TLS, Boston Review, Talisman, How2,
New German Critique, Australian Book Review, Religion and Literature, and other
international journals. He has a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at
the University of Chicago.

++++

That's all for now--
Richard Deming, Co-coordinator

+++

 Claudia Rankine

Thursday, November 10 at 7:00, LC 317. Grad Poets Reading Series Presents
Claudia Rankine. Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She earned her
B.A. in English from Williams College and her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia
University. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don?t
Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004); PLOT (2001); The End of the Alphabet (1998);
and Nothing in Nature is Private (1995), which received the Cleveland State
Poetry Prize. Of her book Don?t Let Me Be Lonely, an experimental multi-genre
project that blends poetry, essays, and images, poet Robert Creeley said:
?Claudia Rankine here manages an extraordinary melding of means to effect the
most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I?ve yet
seen. It?s master work in every sense, and altogether her own.? A recipient
of fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the National Endowments for
the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, she is currently the Henry G. Lee
Professor of English at Pomona College.