After receiving the Windham-Campbell Prize for drama, Kia Corthron published two novels; Abbie Spallen is currently working on her first book. Professor of English, Theater, and Performance Studies, and American Studies, Marc Robinson talks with both writers about leaving their comfort zone to tell stories in a different form.
Tsisti Dangarembga’s three novels have had an enormous impact on women’s writing in Africa and around the world. She’ll discuss all three works in a career-spanning conversation with Courtney J. Martin, the Paul Mellon director of the Yale Center for British Art.
The event will also be livestreamed on the Yale Center for British Art YouTube channel.
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
Please join us to celebrate the opening of “We are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive.” Curator Gabrielle Colangelo will provide a tour of this exciting exhibition and will be available for questions and conversation over light refreshments afterward. No registration is necessary.
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.
Franke Visiting Fellow Lecture
James McAuley
This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War.
