Poet Valzhyna Mort and author Nafissa Thompson-Spires will read from their respective works for the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading on Thursday, February 25 at 7:00 p.m. The annual reading features members of Cornell's distinguished creative writing faculty.
REGISTER HERE to attend!
Mort will read from her most recent poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected.
"With shocking, unforgettable lyric force, Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected confronts the legacy of violent death in one family in Belarus. In these letters to the dead, the poet asks: How do we mourn after a century of propaganda? Can private stories challenge the collective power of Soviet and American historical mythology?" (Read more.)
Thompson-Spires will read from new work, forthcoming in the summer issue of Ploughshares, edited by Aimee Bender. She will touch on how the new story relates to her award-winning book, Heads of the Colored People.
"Heads of the Colored People interrogates our supposedly post-racial era to wicked and devastating effect, exposing the violence that threatens black Americans, no matter their apparent success." (Read more.)
The readings will be followed by a Q&A session, during which attendees will have an opportunity to interact with the writers. The event is free and open to the public.
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, and she writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears, Collected Body and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected. Her work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation fellowship, the Amy Clampitt fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Granta, and many more. Mort translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Valzhyna Mort’s poetry collections have come out in translation in Germany, Sweden and Ukraine, while single poems have been translated into a dozen of languages. Outside the US, she has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and the Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia). Mort is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’ Art Siedenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was also longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, and several other prizes. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The Root, The White Review, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications, and work is forthcoming in multiple anthologies. Thompson-Spires is the Richards Family Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, teaching creative writing in both the MFA and undergrad programs.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.
This is the first virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Next up in the series is a Talk by Rita P. Davis on March 11 at 7:00 p.m. For more information and ongoing updates, visit english.cornell.edu/zalaznick or email creativewriting@cornell.edu. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.
