English Department Agnes Scott College Writers and Scholars Series Fall 2012
Brian Artese “Testimony on Trial” from his new book, Testimony on Trial: Conrad, James and the Contest for Modernism Wednesday, September 12 7 p.m., Luchsinger Fireplace Lounge, Alston Campus Center Book signing to follow Brian Artese earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and his research is focused on global modernism and narrative theory. While teaching at Northwestern, he was lucky enough to marry Agnes Scott’s own Charlotte Artese before they moved to Decatur in 2003. Brian taught courses on modernism and composition at Agnes Scott, then at Georgia State University. Brian won the Henry James Review’s Leon Edel Prize for an essay now incorporated into his book Testimony on Trial: Conrad, James and the Contest for Modernism, published by University of Toronto Press. Brian also creates videos on literary theory—the most recent entitled “Foucault reads Kafka”—now showing on YouTube and other outlets. He is currently writing about representations of audience and of Kafka in cinema.
Chelsea Rathburn Reading her poetry Wednesday, September 26 7 p.m., Luchsinger Fireplace Lounge, Alston Campus Center Book signing to follow Chelsea Rathburn is the author of the poetry collection The Shifting Line, which won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, and the chapbook Unused Lines. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Southern Review, The New England Review and Ploughshares, as well as many other journals and anthologies. In 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently a lecturer in poetry at Emory University, she lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband, the poet Jim May, and their daughter Adelyn.
Jericho Brown Reading his poetry Thursday, October 18 7 p.m., Luchsinger Fireplace Lounge, Alston Campus Center Book signing to follow Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Tin House, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award.
Sorayya Khan Reading her fiction Thursday, November 1 7 p.m., Luchsinger Fireplace Lounge, Alston Campus Center Book signing to follow Sorayya Khan is the author of the novels Noor (Penguin India, 2004) and Five Queen’s Road (Penguin India, 2009). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award, Malahat Review Novella Prize, and Constance Saltonstall Artist Grant. Her work has been published in several literary quarterlies and anthologies. English Department Agnes Scott College Writers and Scholars Series Spring 2013
Tananarive Due Reading her fiction Thursday, February 7 7 p.m., Location TBA Book signing to follow Tananarive Due holds the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College (2012-2013), where she teaches screenwriting and journalism. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. Due’s novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction. In 2004, alongside such luminaries as Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, Due received the “New Voice in Literature Award” at the Yari Yari Pamberi conference co- sponsored by New York University’s Institute of African-American Affairs and African Studies Program and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa. Due has a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar.
David Bottoms Reading his poetry Wednesday, February 20 7 p.m., Luchsinger Fireplace Lounge, Alston Campus Center Book signing to follow David Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of seven other books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. His most recent book of poems, We Almost Disappear, was released last fall. Among his other awards are both the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has served as the Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana, the Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer at Mercer University, and the Chaffee Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University. He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. He is the recipient of a 2011 Governor’s Award in the Humanities and served for twelve years as Poet Laureate of Georgia.
Cailin Copan-Kelly ’06 “The Grotesque Body Politic After Modernism” Tuesday, April 167 p.m., Luchsinger Fireplace Lounge, Alston Campus Center Cailin Copan-Kelly graduated from Agnes Scott College in 2006 with a degree in English Literature-Creative Writing. While at Agnes Scott, she worked as a tutor in the Center for Writing and Speaking and studied abroad in Ireland. Her senior thesis on the writer Kate O’Brien was informed by her time in Ireland and the Writing Center; this project also led her to continue her studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English, a graduate certificate student in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the recipient of the Mr. and Mrs. Spencer T. Olin Fellowship for Women and the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Her dissertation, The Grotesque Body Politic After Modernism, considers how women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Flannery O’Connor, and Muriel Spark use the grotesque to challenge structures of political sovereignty during and after the Second World War.
The English Department at Agnes Scott College Presents
42nd Annual Writers Festival
April 4-5, 2013
Cristina Garcia Thursday, April 4, 4 p.m.
Gish Jen Thursday, April 4, 8 p.m.
Anjail Ahmad Friday, April 5, 1 p.m.
For more information:
www.agnesscott.edu/writersfestival “Agnes Scott College 42nd Annual Writers’ Festival” on Facebook