Dear ALSCW members and friends:

We are delighted to announce the ALSCW's fall Zoom series. As many of you know, the 25th annual conference of the ALSCW, which was scheduled at Yale University in October, was canceled because of the pandemic. Our Zoom series in the fall of 2020 and in the spring of 2021 will help to keep our membership connected and to advance our organization's mission to advance the study and creation of literature. We are deeply grateful to our participants—it’s an incredibly talented lineup—and to all of you for your support of the ALSCW (information on memberships and renewals can be found at ALSCW.org). We will send out a link a week to ten days before each event.

“American Classics, American Crisis”

September 9th, 6 pm to 7:15 pm EST

Moderator: David Mikics is the author most recently of Stanley Kubrick (Yale Jewish Lives), Bellow's People (Norton) and Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (Harvard). John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English and Honors at the University of Houston, he is also a columnist for Salmagundi and for Tablet magazine, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn and Houston. He will become Vice President of the ALSCW in 2021.

Panelists:
Mark Edmundson is University Professor at the University of Virginia and the author of a dozen books, including Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals and The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing Teaching. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Literary Imagination, Raritan, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The American Scholar, Yale Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other venues. The National Endowment of the Humanities has honored him as a Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College and the author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War. Earlier books include The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany and Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and other journals, he has received both a Guggenheim and Public Scholar Award from the NEH, along with the Balakian Citation from the National Book Critics Circle for his work as a reviewer.

Myra Jehlen was Board of Governors Professor of English and American Literature at Rutgers, where she also taught Comparative Literature. A member of the editorial board of Raritan, she is the author of Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Readings at the Edge of Literature, American Incarnation, and Class and Character in Faulkner's South. She has recently completed a long essay on Huckleberry Finn and the controversy surrounding it.

Marjorie Perloff in conversation with Rosanna Warren about her new biography Max Jacob: A Life in Art

October 14th, 6 pm to 7:15 pm EST

Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita at Stanford University. Her books include The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), The Futurist Moment:Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986) Wittgenstein's Ladder (1996), The Vienna Paradox (2004), Differentials: Poetry,Poetics, Pedagogy, which won the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism in 2005, and Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2016). She is a former Vice President of the ALSCW.

Rosanna Warren is Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Ghost in a Red Hat (2011) and So Forth (2020).She has published a book of literary criticism and edited a volume of essays about translation, and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She is a former President of the ALSCW. Her biography of Max Jacob will be published in October 2020.

 

"Poetry in the Age of Black Lives Matter"

November 11, 6 pm to 7:15 pm EST

Major Jackson is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English at the University of Vermont, where he teaches creative writing, contemporary poetry, and African American literature. He is the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming volume The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020). His edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019 and Renga for Obama. He serves as poetry editor of The Harvard Review.

Gregory Pardlo's collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors include fellowships from the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and Director of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays.

Ernest Suarez
David M. O'Connell Professor of English
Executive Director, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
Chair, Department of English