Yiyun Li received the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction during the first year of the pandemic. She comes to campus for the first time since receiving the prize to launch her highly-anticipated new novel The Book of Goose and to discuss her work with critic Anthony Domestico. Free copies to the first forty guests! Signing to follow.
Start your festival day with free coffee and treats, book and tote bag giveaways, and a short reading by playwright Aleshea Harris.
Yale University President Peter Salovey presents the 2022 awards in drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and former United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write.”
Trethewey will be introduced by Meghan O’Rourke, editor of The Yale Review.
The lecture will also be livestreamed on the Windham-Campbell YouTube channel
Yale College Poets: an annual reading by outstanding undergraduate poets co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library and the Creative Writing Program of the Yale Department of English. This year’s readers are: Edie Abraham-Macht, Hailey Andrews, Jisoo Choi, Gabrielle Colangelo, Adin Feder, Danny Germino-Watnick, Vaughn Goehrig, Charlotte Keathley, Aaron Magloire, Bryce Morales, Nyeda Regina Stewart, and Chie Xu
Franke Visiting Fellow Lecture
Alejandra Oliva
How are power structures and empathy implicated in translation? What do we owe asylum seekers, and the stories they bring? What does it mean to bear witness, or to take action? Based on her experiences as an observer and translator in different parts of the U.S. immigration system, Alejandra Oliva reflects on the ways, both big and small, that the system fails the people within it—and the shift required to fix it.
Writing in an Age of Crisis: A Yale Review Poetry Reading. Join us for a conversation and reading with TYR Editors Rachel Mannheimer and Roger Reeves, introduced by TYR Senior Editor Maggie Millner.
HYBRID Event
Celebrated translator and biographer Richard Zenith has spent much of the past three decades translating and writing about the great Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa.
At Yale, Zenith will talk about what - through all these years - led to some of his recent revisions to his translations and reflect on translation more generally.
Yale University Library has been collecting Chinese-language materials for 170 years. Six titles of Chinese classical texts were deposited at Yale in August 1849, making the College Library the first academic library in the United States to collect Chinese-language books. Samuel Wells Williams, the inaugural Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Yale, was largely responsible for the earliest acquisitions for the Library. Yung Wing, the first Chinese citizen to graduate from a major American college, was the most important contributor to the founding of Yale’s Chinese Collection.
In conjunction with the 50 Women at Yale 150 campus-wide celebration, two Yale College seniors have curated side-by-side exhibits on two different aspects of women at Yale using materials from library collections. Each curator will give a brief talk about their exhibit in the Exhibition Corridor followed by light refreshments in the Memorabilia Room.
