The Rose O'Neill Literary House and the Department of English present Literary House Director, Mark Nowak, for an introduction to his work.
Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman joined us for a reading and conversation on the campus green, part of the "Pictures + Words: The New Literature of Graphic Narrative" festival.
Poet Frank Giampietro M'02 joined editor April Ossmann to discuss the collaborative experience of publishing his poetry manuscript Begin Anywhere.
Spring 2010 at the Lit House
All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.
Readings: Writers and Scholars
Benjamin Kohl, Professor Emeritus of History, Vassar College
- Life in the Venetian Archives
Thursday, January 28, Tea at 4:00 p.m., Talk at 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
From 1966 until his retirement in 1998, Dr. Benjamin
Kohl taught medieval and early modern history at
Vassar, where he served as chair of the Department for seven years.
Among his publications are the edited volumes The Earthly Republic:
Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), Major Problems in the History of the
Italian Renaissance (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1995), and An abridged
translation of Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (Asheville, N.C.:
Pegasus Press, 1998) and books including Padua under the Carrara,
1318-1405 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and
a collection of fourteen of his papers, published as Culture and Politics
in Early Renaissance Padua (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2001). Kohl
currently resides in Betterton, Maryland, where he is currently working
on a book on the Governance of Late Medieval Venice. In addition to
his work as a scholar, on the Eastern Shore Kohl teaches in the local
Elderhostel, directs The Hedgelawn Foundation, Inc. (a small charitable
trust dedicated to the promotion of the humanities, historic preservation,
and the visual and performing arts), serves as the Secretary of the Town
of Betterton Planning Commission, and drives for Food Link.
GEOGRAPHIES OF FREEDOM: A SYMPOSIUM
Revolt on Goose Island: A Talk by Kari Lydersen
Wednesday, February 10, 4:00 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Kari Lydersen is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a frequent contributor to The Chicago Reporter, In These Times, ColorLines, Contratiempo and the Earth Island Journal. She specializes in environmental and social justice stories, including a focus on Latin America and immigrant communities. She is author of Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in the Global Age (Common Courage, 2005) and Revolt on Goose Island (Melville House, 2009) and co-author, with Wafaa Bilal, of Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun (City Lights, 2008). Lydersen was awarded the 2009 Ethnic Media Fellowship from the USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism. She teaches Community News at Columbia College.
Domestic Tension: A Talk by Wafaa Bilal
Thursday, February 11, 2:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal has exhibited his art world wide and lectured extensively to inform audiences of the situation of the Iraqi people and the importance of peaceful conflict resolution. Bilal's 2007 dynamic installation “Domestic Tension” placed him on the receiving end of a paintball gun that was accessible online to a worldwide audience, 24 hours a day. Newsweek called the project “breathtaking” and the Chicago Tribune called the month-long piece "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time." Bilal has exhibited in Baghdad, the Netherlands, Thailand and Croatia—as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum and various other US galleries. In fall 2008 City Lights published Shoot an Iraqi: Life, Art and Resistance Under the Gun, a book about Bilal’s life and the Domestic Tension project.
Poems from Guantanamo: A Talk by Marc Falkoff
Thursday, February 11, 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Marc Falkoff is an Assistant Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University. Since 2004, he has been a principal lawyer in the habeas representation of seventeen prisoners being held by the U.S. military at Guantánamo Bay on suspicion of involvement with terrorism. For this work, he was named the Charles F.C. Ruff Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year in 2005 by Covington & Burling, LLP. He received the Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award in 2007 from the Southern Center for Human Rights, and the Bill of Rights in Action Award in 2008 from the Constitutional Rights Foundation in Chicago. Professor Falkoff writes and speaks frequently about the rule of law in the context of the war on terror. The book of prisoner poetry he edited – Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak – was a bestselling anthology and has been translated into a dozen languages.
Geographies of Freedom: A Roundtable Discussion with Wafaa Bilal,
Marc Falkoff, and Kari Lydersen
Thursday, February 11, 5:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Question/Answer session with poet Claudia Rankine
Wednesday, March 17, 2:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Claudia Rankine: A Reading
Wednesday, March 17, 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Christine Wade, Associate Professor of Political Science and
International Studies - Waging Peace
Wednesday, March 24, Tea at 4:00 p.m., Talk at 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill
Literary House
Dr. Wade is the co-author of Understanding Central America: Global
Forces, Rebellion and Change (Westview Press, 2005, 2009) and A
Revolução Salvadorenha (The Salvadoran Revolution) (Fundação Editora
Da UNESP, 2006). She is also the author of several publications on the
FMLN, peacebuilding and post-war politics in El Salvador and Central
America. She is currently completing on a manuscript on the politics of
peacebuilding in El Salvador and a co-authored book on Nicaraguan
post-war politics.
Sophie Kerr Weekend Speaker
Daniel Handler: A Fiction Reading, book signing to follow
Friday, March 26, 4:00 p.m., Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts
Daniel Handler is the author of the literary
novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your
Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs.
Under the name Lemony Snicket he has
also written a sequence of books for
children, known collectively as A Series
of Unfortunate Events, which have sold
more than 53 million copies and were
the basis of a film starring Jim Carrey.
His intricate and witty writing style has won him numerous fans for his
critically acclaimed literary work and his wildly successful children’s books.
Handler has worked intermittently in film and music, most recently in
collaboration with composer Nathaniel Stookey on a piece commissioned
and recorded by the San Francisco Symphony, entitled “The Composer
Is Dead,” which has been performed all over the world and is now a
book with CD. An adjunct accordionist for the music group The Magnetic
Fields, he is also the author of Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized
Autobiography, The Beatrice Letters, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t
Avoid, and two books for Christmas: The Lump of Coal and The Latke
Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: a Christmas story. He is the screenwriter
of the film Rick, a revamp of the Verdi opera Rigoletto, and the film
adaptation of Joel Rose’s novel Kill the Poor, and has written for The
New York Times, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer,
Chickfactor, and various anthologies, and was the chair of the Judging
Panel for the National Book Awards in Young People’s Literature, 2008.
His current projects include a fourth novel for adults, a picture book
in collaboration with Maira Kalman and the script for the long-awaited
second Snicket movie.
“Daniel Handler [is] something like an American Nabokov.”— Dave Eggers
“One of our most dazzling literary conjurers.”— Michael Chabon
“Sentence by sentence, Handler dazzles, teases the unwary with
unforeseeable
perceptions.”— San Francisco Chronicle
Sponsored by: The Rose O'Neill Literary House and The Sophie Kerr Committee
Michele Volansky, Assistant Professor of Drama - Critical Landscape
Thursday, April 1, Tea at 4:00 p.m., Talk at 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary
House
Michele Volansky has worked on over 150 new and
established plays during her time as Dramaturg/Literary Manager at
Actors Theatre of Louisville,
Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the
Philadelphia Theatre Company, as well as at theaters across the United
States. She is the co-author, with Bruce Graham, of The Collaborative
Playwright, published by Heinneman Press. Volansky is also an Associate
Artist with PlayPenn, a new play development conference based in
Philadelphia. In addition, she is completing her PhD at the University of
Hull in England, writing about the critics Kenneth Tynan and Frank Rich.
Washington College/PEN World Voices Fellow in International Letters
Spring 2010, date to-be-announced
Each spring, an international writer joins us for a residency and series of
lectures on his or her work before heading to the PEN American Center’s
World Voices Festival in New York City. Past Fellows include French
graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert and Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah.
In-House Events
Join our monthly Community Meetings for networking, event planning, conversation, and, above all, for sharing a love of language, stories, and the creative life. Anyone with an interest in overseeing, imagining, and inhabiting the House is welcome. Meetings are largely shaped by participants' ideas and concerns. First-time attendees are always welcome.
Beginner's Print Shop Workshop: Introduction to Letterpress
Tuesdays 6:30-8:30pm
Start date TBD
Our free, non-credit Print Shop Workshops are open to students, faculty,
and staff at Washington College and our Chestertown neighbors. Come
learn the history of the book and the printed word, and try your hand at
letterpress printing and bookbinding. Master Printer Mike Kaylor instructs. To sign up, email kbursick2@washcoll.edu.
Advanced Workshop: Book Arts
Thursdays 6:30-8:30 p.m. (prerequisite: Beginner's Workshop
Start date TBD
Our free, non-credit Print Shop Workshops are open to students, faculty,
and staff at Washington College and our Chestertown neighbors. Come
learn the history of the book and the printed word, and try your hand at
letterpress printing and bookbinding. Master Printer Mike Kaylor instructs. To sign up, email kbursick2@washcoll.edu.
First-Year Reading
Wednesday, February 24, 7:00 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Come hear the best and brightest Washington College First-Year writers read from their original work. Reception follows. Sponsored by: The Rose O'Neill Literary House, The Writers' Union, and the Department of English
Annual Graduate School Tea: Getting In and Beyond
Thursday, February 25, 4:00 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Washington College graduates Liam Daley (MA, St. Andrews University),
Stephany Fontanone (MA, University of Alabama), and David Orvis (PhD,
University of Arizona) discuss their experiences with graduate school—the
application process, succeeding in a graduate program, and careers—
and offer tips to students who are considering graduate school in English. Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee, the Rose O’Neill Literary House, and the Center
for Career Development.
The Senior Reading
April 20, 7:00 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Bid farewell to your favorite graduating senior writers as they read from
their original pieces. Reception follows. Sponsored by: The Department of English, The Writers’ Union, and The Rose O’Neill Literary
House
William Warner Prize & Veryan Beacham Prize Reception
Wednesday, April 7, 5:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
2009 Warner Prize winner Alyse Bensel ’10 and 2009 Beacham Prize
winner Jacki Bower ’10 read from their original, prize-winning works.
Last Semester
Readings: Writers and Scholars
Sean Meehan, Assistant Professor of English - "This is a Fragment
of Me": Emerson and the Poetics of Metonymy
November 17, 4:00 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Dr. Sean Meehan began his scholarly focus on the American writer
Ralph Waldo Emerson with a dissertation on photography in nineteenthcentury
American autobiography he completed at the University of Iowa.
He recently published a book based on that dissertation, Mediating
American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass,
and Whitman. His lecture on Emerson and metonymy is part of his
current work-in-progress, a study of Emerson’s engagement with the
practice and theory of education and an exploration of Emersonian
ways of learning both from the past and for the future. He was awarded
the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association Fellowship for 2005-
2006 from Houghton Library, Harvard University. He published an article
based on research he did at Houghton in Emerson Society Papers
(2006), “Living Learning: Lessons from Emerson’s School.” In addition to
teaching “Emerson and Whitman” and “American Environmental Writing,”
Professor Meehan teaches “Literature and Composition” and is the
Director of Writing for the College.
In-House Events
Join our monthly Community Meetings for networking, event planning, conversation, and, above all, for sharing a love of language, stories, and the creative life. Anyone with an interest in overseeing, imagining, and inhabiting the House is welcome. Meetings are largely shaped by participants' ideas and concerns. First-time attendees are always welcome.
Beginner's Print Shop Workshop: Introduction to Letterpress
Tuesdays 6:30-8:30pm
Begins Tuesday, September 15, Print Shop, Rose O'Neill Literary House
Our free, non-credit Print Shop Workshops are open to students, faculty,
and staff at Washington College and our Chestertown neighbors. Come
learn the history of the book and the printed word, and try your hand at
letterpress printing and bookbinding. Master Printer Mike Kaylor instructs. To sign up, email kbursick2@washcoll.edu.
Advanced Workshop: Book Arts
Thursdays 6:30-8:30 p.m. (prerequisite: Beginner's Workshop
Begins Thursday, September 10, Print Shop, Rose O'Neill Literary House
Our free, non-credit Print Shop Workshops are open to students, faculty,
and staff at Washington College and our Chestertown neighbors. Come
learn the history of the book and the printed word, and try your hand at
letterpress printing and bookbinding. Master Printer Mike Kaylor instructs. To sign up, email kbursick2@washcoll.edu.
Jeff Talarigo, a fiction reading
October 1, 4:30 p.m., Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library
Jeff Talarigo is the author of the award winning novel, The Pearl Diver,
which won the 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal
Foundation Award and was named a 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book.
His second novel, The Ginseng Hunter, noted as one of the “Best Books
of 2008” by NPR and an American Library Association’s “Notable Books
for 2009,” will be released in paperback in April of 2009. Talarigo currently
lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is working on a novel about
20th Century Gaza as seen through the eyes of a Palestinian woman.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
Andrew Gibson - "His Journey Westward": Joyce's The Dead, Irish History, and Modernity
October 12, 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Dr. Andrew Gibson is Research Professor
of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal
Holloway, University of London, a permanent
advisory editor to the James Joyce
Quarterly, and a member of the editorial
board of Limit(e) Beckett, the new Anglo-
French journal in Beckett scholarship set
up at the Université de Paris VII to build bridges between French and
Anglophone Beckett Studies. His publications include: Reading Narrative
Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett (Macmillan,
1990), Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh University
Press, 1996), Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas
(Routledge, 1999), Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics
in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford University Press, 2002; paperback, 2005), James
Joyce: A Critical Life (Reaktion, 2006), and Beckett and Badiou: The
Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
Dan Chaon, a fiction reading
October 13, 4:30 p.m., Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library
Dan Chaon, born and raised in Sidney,
Nebraska, is the author of the short-story
collections Fitting Ends and Other Stories
(Northwestern UP, 1996; reprinted by Ballantine,
2003) and Among the Missing (Ballantine,
2002) which was a finalist for the National
Book Award. It was listed as one of the ten
best books of 2001 by the American Library
Association, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston
Globe, The Las Vegas Mercury, and Entertainment Weekly and was also
cited by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and The New York
Times as one of the Notable Books of the year. His stories have appeared
in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 1996 and 2003, The
Pushcart Prize 2000, 2002, and 2003, as well as such noteworthy literary
journals as TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Crazyhorse,
Gettysburg Review, MSS, Story, Helicon, Mid-American Review,
and elsewhere. Chaon’s first novel, You Remind Me of Me, was released
in 2004 and praised by Publishers Weekly for its “elegant prose, haunting
plot and knockout literary excellence.” His most recent novel, Await Your
Reply, has recently been published by Ballantine Books. Chaon currently
teaches creative writing at Oberlin College, where he holds the position of
Houck Associate Professor in the Humanities.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
Song Yet Sung: A Reading by James McBride
October 29, 4:30 p.m., Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts
Book signing to follow
Best-selling author and musician James
McBride has written for the Washington
Post, People, the Boston Globe, Essence,
Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.
He is the author of The Color of Water and
Miracle at St. Anna. In his new book, Song
Yet Sung, McBride follows a group of slaves
as they escape to freedom through the
swamps of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Song
Yet Sung was chosen by the Maryland
Humanities Council to represent the One
Maryland One Book program for 2009, and
was chosen by Washington College for its First-Year Book program.
The First-Year Book program gives new students a common experience
over the summer and introduces them to Washington College’s tradition
of bringing great writers to campus.
Sponsored by: The Rose O’Neill Literary House, The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the
American Experience, the Department of English, the Dean of the College, Gunston Day
School’s In Celebration of Books, Kent County Public Library, and the One Maryland One
Book program of the Maryland Humanities Council.
Taije Silverman, a poetry reading
November 11, 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Taije Silverman’s poems have appeared in Poetry,
Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Five Points, Massachusetts
Review, Prairie Schooner, and other
journals. The recipient of the 2005–2007 Emory
University Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as
residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she is now
Assistant Visiting Professor at Ursinus College,
outside of Philadelphia. Her first collection of poems, Houses Are Fields,
was published by LSU Press in 2009, and selected as the debut book in
their Sea Cliff Series. Thrice nominated for the Pushchart Prize, she has
received the Anais Nin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and
her book has just been translated into Italian. Italian translations of her
individual poems are forthcoming in the Italian Poetry Review, at Columbia
University, and in ClanDESTino, at the University of Bologna. Her own
translations from the Italian of poems by Paolo Valesio are forthcoming in
Pleiades.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
Debra Spark, a fiction reading
November 12, 4:30 p.m., Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library
Debra Spark is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint (Faber
& Faber, Avon) and The Ghost of Bridgetown (Graywolf) and editor of
the anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America’s New
Young Writers (Scribners). Her thoughts on the craft of writing have been
collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing (University of
Michigan Press). Short fiction, essays, articles and book reviews have
appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, Epoch, Agni, Gingko Tree Review,
narrativemagazine.com, The New York Times, New England Travel and
Life, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post and
The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the
recipient of several awards including a NEA fellowship, a Bunting Institute
fellowship from Radcliffe College, a Pushcart Prize, and the John Zacharis
/ Ploughshares award for best first book. Spark currently teaches at
Colby College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson
College. Her latest novel, Good for the Jews, will be published in October
by University of Michigan Press.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
Leslie Harrison, a poetry reading
November 19, 4:30 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Leslie Harrison’s Displacement was the 2008
Katherine Nason Bakeless winner in poetry
from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. It
was published by Mariner Books, an imprint
of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in July of 2009.
She has poems and prose published in Poetry,
Southwest Review, The New Republic, Barn
Owl Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.
She holds graduate degrees from The Johns
Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine where she
completed her MFA in 2006. She has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar
at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellow at the Bread Loaf
Writers’ Conference.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
David Orvis - Shakespeare's Queer Marriages
March 3, 4:30 p.m., Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library
David L. Orvis, a 2002 graduate of Washington
College, earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English
from the University of Arizona. He is currently
an Assistant Professor of English and Faculty
Affiliate in Women’s Studies at Appalachian
State University. He is working on his first book,
tentatively titled Performing Queer Marriage on
the Early Modern St age, as well as a collection of
essays on Psalms in the Early Modern World, co-edited with Linda Phyllis
Austern and Kari Boyd McBride. He has articles forthcoming in The Journal
of Homosexuality, In Search of the Normal: Developments in the Histories
of Sexualities, 1200-1900, Selected Papers from the Sexual Identities
in Shakespeare Conference, The Explicator, and Performing Pedagogy:
Gender and Instruction in Early Modern England.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket)
March 26, 4:00 p.m., Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts
A Fiction Reading by our Sophie Kerr Weekend Speaker, Book signing to follow
Daniel Handler is the author of the literary
novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your
Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs.
Under the name Lemony Snicket he has
also written a sequence of books for
children, known collectively as A Series
of Unfortunate Events, which have sold
more than 53 million copies and were
the basis of a film starring Jim Carrey.
His intricate and witty writing style has won him numerous fans for his
critically acclaimed literary work and his wildly successful children’s books.
Handler has worked intermittently in film and music, most recently in
collaboration with composer Nathaniel Stookey on a piece commissioned
and recorded by the San Francisco Symphony, entitled “The Composer
Is Dead,” which has been performed all over the world and is now a
book with CD. An adjunct accordionist for the music group The Magnetic
Fields, he is also the author of Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized
Autobiography, The Beatrice Letters, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t
Avoid, and two books for Christmas: The Lump of Coal and The Latke
Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: a Christmas story. He is the screenwriter
of the film Rick, a revamp of the Verdi opera Rigoletto, and the film
adaptation of Joel Rose’s novel Kill the Poor, and has written for The
New York Times, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer,
Chickfactor, and various anthologies, and was the chair of the Judging
Panel for the National Book Awards in Young People’s Literature, 2008.
His current projects include a fourth novel for adults, a picture book
in collaboration with Maira Kalman and the script for the long-awaited
second Snicket movie.
“Daniel Handler [is] something like an American Nabokov.”— Dave Eggers
“One of our most dazzling literary conjurers.”— Michael Chabon
“Sentence by sentence, Handler dazzles, teases the unwary with
unforeseeable
perceptions.”— San Francisco Chronicle
Sponsored by: The Rose O'Neill Literary House and The Sophie Kerr Committee
Eric Mallin - "In spite of my own nature": King Lear and the Perverse
April 12, 4:30 p.m., Sophie Kerr Room, Miller Library
Eric S. Mallin is Associate Professor of English at
the University of Texas at Austin. He has written
Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of
Elizabethan England (University of California Press,
1996) and Godless Shakespeare (Continuum,
2007), as well as numerous articles and reviews. His
lecture on King Lear is part of a book in progress
called Perverse: The Hidden History of the Normal.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
Michael Drout - Whole Worlds Out of Single Words: Tolkien and Language
April 15, 4:30 p.m., Litrenta Lecture Hall, Toll Science Center
The Prentice Professor and Chair of the English
Department at Wheaton College in Norton,
Massachusetts, Michael Drout is a specialist in
Anglo-Saxon Literature and the works of J.R.R.
Tolkien. He is the editor of Beowulf and the Critics,
a collection of Tolkien’s scholarly work, as well
as the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia and Tolkien
Studies, the foremost scholarly journal on the
works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is also the author
of How Tradition Works, a study of the poetics
of the Anglo-Saxon tenth century, and he has lately dedicated himself to
producing oral performances of the entire Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus in
podcast form. A celebrated teacher, he has recorded a popular series of
lectures on Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon poetry with the Recorded Books
company, which are available under their “Modern Scholar” series.
Sponsored by: The Sophie Kerr Committee
XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics
Nearly fifteen years ago, new Lit House Director Mark Nowak created
XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, a journal that brought together writers
in social documentary from a variety of fields—anthropology, poetry,
performance studies, theatre, and history. XCP has since published
writings from emerging young writers in these and other fields as well
as established scholars and artists such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Amiri
Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and Adrienne Rich. In addition to bringing
XCP to Washington College, this spring will inaugurate a series of
readings by regular contributors to the journal. Please check the Rose
O’Neill Literary House website for complete details on these spring
events.
Rose O'Neill Literary House "Tea & Talk" Series
Join us at the Lit House for tea, cookies, and a series of talks featuring writers and scholars from Washington College and the Chestertown community.
Eric Mills, Director of Media Relations - Phantom Ships and Ghostly
Crews: A Haunted History of the U.S. Navy
October 27, 4:00 p.m., Rose O'Neill Literary House
Book signing to follow
In addition to his new book, The Spectral Tide: True Ghost Stories of
the U.S. Navy, an exploration of unexplained paranormal phenomena
throughout the history of America’s sea service, Eric Mills is the author of
Chesapeake Rumrunners of the Roaring Twenties and Chesapeake Bay
in the Civil War, which served as the inspiration for “The Bay at War,” a
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities-funded special exhibit at Virginia’s
Steamboat Era Museum. Mills wrote the script for the exhibit’s accompanying
documentary film, which was narrated by Roger Mudd. He frequently
contributes historically themed articles to Naval History, Chesapeake Bay
Magazine, Baltimore Magazine and other periodicals. Mills has worked as
a Chesapeake Publishing newspaper reporter/editor, as editor of publications
for the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, as exhibits researcher for
the Historical Society of Talbot County, and as an acquisitions editor for the
Naval Institute Press. He is currently completing a master’s degree in history
at Washington College, where he is director of media relations.
For more events
If you want to get involved with one of the many student groups that frequent the Lit House, here’s who to see:
- The Writers’ Union - Mac Boyle ’10
- Writers’ Theatre - Erin Gray ’10
- The Artist’s Union - Joe Yates ’11
- Guerrilla Musical Theatre - Joe Yates ’10
- C.S. Lewis Discussion Group - Liz Leipold ’10
- The Medium - Karen Hye ’10
- The Collegian - Karen Hye ’09
- The Elm - Alisha George ’09
Don't forget to check out the First-Year Book and the Sophie Kerr Events, too!
Want to know more about what's going on at the Lit House? Join our mailing list or read BitLit, our blog.