News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Art & Protest: A Conversation

    October 14, 2020

    See, download, and share poster From the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall Street , Bolotnaya Square to Nuit debout , the Arab Spring , the Movement of the...

  • Beinecke Library hosts Emily Wilson, translator of the “Odyssey” (Yale Daily News)

    October 11, 2020

    On Wednesday, translator Emily Wilson GRD ’01 delivered the 2020 edition of the Mark Strand Memorial Reading, where she read from her in-progress translations of Homer’s “Iliad” and Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannus” on a Zoom webinar. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library hosts the Mark Strand Memorial Reading Series and invites accomplished American poets to read their work.

  • Beinecke Library 2019-2020 Annual Report

    October 9, 2020

    The Beinecke Library 2019-2020 Annual Report, including stories, statistics, and selected recent acquisitions, can be read and downloaded here: Beinecke...

  • How I Met the Reclusive Georgia O’Keeffe (The New Yorker)

    October 1, 2020

    "And so I began the project. I did much of the archival research at the Beinecke Library, at Yale, which holds the vast O’Keeffe-Stieglitz archive. There, I worked in tranquil silence within the alabaster walls, leafing through papers and photographs; reading long, chatty, private, serious, funny, heartfelt, and thoughtful letters; learning a complicated network of kinship, friendships, and professional relationships. I enjoyed those times enormously."

  • Workshop inspired creative expression in cellblocks

    September 24, 2020

    When a student named Justin wrote pieces for a creative writing workshop offered by the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) this summer, he felt like he was sharing his heart with the world. The workshop, which was offered to inmates at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institute in Suffield, Connecticut, made him feel his heart was “treated as a heart should be,” Justin said.

  • With festival cancelled, Windham-Campbell Prizes find new ways to celebrate

    September 11, 2020

    In a typical year, the 2020 recipients of Yale’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes would visit campus this month for a three-day festival to share their work and celebrate the written word with the local community. With this year’s festival cancelled due to the pandemic, the prize’s organizers have found a new way to honor the eight recipients and their craft. The celebration will instead combine an original lecture by a legendary writer with a special edition of one of the country’s most prestigious literary journals. Renowned science fiction author and literary critic Samuel R. Delany will deliver a keynote address as was originally planned. His lecture, based on the theme “Why I Write,” will be presented online on Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 5 p.m. ET

  • Windham-Campbell Prizes to hold hybrid winners' 'festival' (The Bookseller)

    September 7, 2020

    The Windham-Campbell Prizes will this year hold the annual autumn festival at Yale University, celebrating the work of the winners, as a hybrid virtual and print “festival”. Administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the annual English-language awards are split across fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama with winners getting the sum of $165,000 (£125,000) each to support their writing.

  • Libraries open to students on campus and across the globe (Yale Daily News)

    September 3, 2020

    Students studying remotely, though unable to use library spaces, have access to nearly all library materials through various services provided by the University. Once COVID-19 cases spiked in the spring, library staff began digitizing thousands of library resources that can be easily accessed online. They have scanned over 20,000 images in the last month from the Beinecke Library alone, according to Beinecke Director Edwin Schroeder.

  • Holding Up a Mirror to the First Global Stock Bubble

    September 3, 2020

    Exactly 300 years ago, in 1720, Europe was seized by a mania for investing in the expanding trade in the New World; stock prices soared and then collapsed, in what is now recognized as the first global stock bubble. Yale SOM’s William Goetzmann, an expert in art and finance history, showed us the satirical prints that documented the financial cataclysm in the book Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (The Great Mirror of Folly).

  • "New to the world" Talking to Leonard Marcus '72, a scholar of children’s books.

    September 1, 2020

    After our May/June and July/August issues reported at length on the pandemic and dissected the brutality of racism, we at the Yale Alumni Magazine dearly wanted to deliver something more joyful. COVID-19, let alone racism, won’t disappear soon; we’ll be coming back to those subjects. But for September/October, we turned to children’s books. As Leonard Marcus ’72 told me—and we at the magazine have embraced the concept for this issue—“Children’s smiling is relevant to getting through a crisis.”

  • COVID-19 Library Updates

    August 31, 2020

    All Yale libraries are closed until further notice; library staff working remotely will continue to provide online support for Yale classes and research.

  • Lola Hayes and "Tone Pictures of the Negro in Music" (WNYC)

    August 31, 2020

    The November 29th program considered "the musical setting of poems by Langston Hughes and included the bard himself. "Langston Hughes was guest of honor and punctuated his interview with a reading from his opera Troubled Island."[2] The original Hughes-annotated WNYC script is below.