All Spring 2020 Dept. of English events and on-campus gatherings are cancelled.
We will try to reschedule, where possible.
More event information and ongoing updates at english.cornell.edu/english-events.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by Emily Fridlund & Joanie Mackowski
Thursday, February 6, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring Emily Fridlund, fiction writer, and Joanie Mackowski, poet.
Emily Fridlund’s first novel, History of Wolves, was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Fridlund’s debut collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, and Southwest Review. She grew up in Minnesota and teaches writing at Cornell University.
Joanie Mackowski’s collections of poems are The Zoo and View from a Temporary Window. She has won awards from the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. An associate professor in Cornell University’s English Department and Creative Writing Program, she has previously worked as a French translator, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a juggler.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reading by M. Evelina Galang, Writer & Activist
In keeping with the latest university policy, the Reading by M. Evelina Galang scheduled for March 12 has been CANCELLED.
We plan to reschedule Ms. Evelina’s reading; more information will be made available, as we have it, at https://english.cornell.edu/english-events.
The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series continues with a reading by writer & activist M. Evelina Galang, Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for Spring 2020.
M. Evelina Galang is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self, novels One Tribe and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery, the nonfiction work Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living With War, and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Among her numerous awards are the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for One Tribe, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and President of the Board of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices). She is the Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for Spring 2020.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University; Cornell University 2019-20 Invited Society Scholar, Society for the Humanities)
In keeping with the latest university policy, the Gellman Lecture scheduled for March 19 has been CANCELED. We may reschedule; more information will be made available, as we have it, at https://english.cornell.edu/english-events.
Brent Hayes Edwards is the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Edwards has edited scholarly editions of Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and (in collaboration with Jean-Christophe Cloutier) Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth, and he served as the Harlem Renaissance period editor for the revised Third Edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature published in 2014. From 2001-2011, Edwards was co-editor of the journal Social Text, and he is also a member of the editorial boards of Transition and Callaloo. His translations include essays, poems, and fiction by authors including Edouard Glissant, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Sony Labou Tansi, and Monchoachi, as well as Michel Leiris’s 1934 book Phantom Africa, for which Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the 2019-20 Invited Society Scholar for the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.
The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ‘81, who majored in English at Cornell.
Reception to follow in the Dining Room, A.D. White House
Reading by Patrick Somerville, Screenwriter & Novelist
Thursday, April 30, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series comes to a close with a reading by screenwriter & novelist Patrick Somerville.
Patrick Somerville is a novelist and screenwriter, and the creator of the series Maniac (Netflix), as well as two upcoming series, Station 11 and Made For Love (HBO Max). He got his start writing for television on the FX drama The Bridge and later wrote for the second and third seasons of HBO's The Leftovers. He is the author of two short story collections and the novels, This Bright River and The Cradle. He grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and lives with his wife and three kids in Los Angeles.
Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
