Next Up | Myung Mi Kim

Poet Myung Mi Kim, Professor of English and core faculty member of the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the author most recently of Penury, makes her first appearance in the New Writing Series on Thursday, October 25, 2012 at 4:30pm in the the Soderberg Center Auditorium (Jenness Hall) on the flagship campus of the University of Maine system in Orono.

The reading, which is free & open to the community, will be introduced by Carla Billitteri and will be followed by questions from the audience.

Myung Mi Kim is the author of Commons (University of California Press, 2002), DURA (Sun & Moon, 1999), The Bounty (Chax Press, 1996, 2000), and Under Flag (Kelsey Street Press, 1991, 1998, and 2008). The anthologies in which her work has appeared include American Poets in the 21st century:  The New American Poetics, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions:  Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women and other collections. Kim’s collaborations include “Spelt,” with the poet Susan Gevirtz. A collaboration with the poet, visual artist, and translator, Norma Cole, appeared in big bridge #12. The composer John Zorn commissioned her to write a bilingual Korean/English text which can be heard on Zorn’s “New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands”. Most recently, she completed a commission from the Friends of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo, for their annual broadside.

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The UMaine New Writing Series is sponsored by the English Department and the National Poetry Foundationwith support from the Lloyd H. Elliott fund, the Milton Ellis Memorial Fund, the Honors College, and the Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series Committee. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Pulp & Paper Foundation for the use of the Soderberg Center. For more information contact Steve Evans at steven dot evans at maine dot edu or at 207-581-3818.

If you have a disability that requires accommodation for a NWS event, please contact Ann Smith in the office of Disability Support Service, 121 East Annex, 581-2319 (Voice) or 581-2311 (TDD).

Next Up | Jeffrey DeShell

Fiction writer Jeffrey DeShell, author most recently of Arthouse, makes his first appearance in the New Writing Series on Thursday, October 18, 2012, in the Soderberg Center Auditorium (Jenness Hall) on the flagship campus of the University of Maine system in Orono. The event starts at 4:30pm and is free & open to the public, though seating is limited. UMaine Creative Writing Faculty member Dave Kress will introduce and host the event.

Jeffrey DeShell has published five novels: Arthouse (FC2),The Trouble with Being Born (FC2), Peter: An (A)Historical Romance (Starcherone), S & M (FC2) and In Heaven Everything is Fine (FC2), and a critical book, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe’s Fiction. DeShell was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Budapest, and has taught in Northern Cyprus, the American Midwest and Bard College.  Currently he’s a professor of English at the Universityof Colorado at Boulder.  He lives in Boulder with the novelist Elisabeth Sheffield and their two children.

Arthouse is an audacious transformation in prose of fourteen modernist films. From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic—The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShell’s inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professor’s journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.

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On Facebook? Consider joining the NWS group here.

The UMaine New Writing Series is sponsored by the English Department and the National Poetry Foundationwith support from the Lloyd H. Elliott fund, the Milton Ellis Memorial Fund, the Honors College, and the Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series Committee. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Pulp & Paper Foundation for the use of the Soderberg Center. For more information contact Steve Evans at steven dot evans at maine dot edu or at 207-581-3818.

If you have a disability that requires accommodation for a NWS event, please contact Ann Smith in the office of Disability Support Service, 121 East Annex, 581-2319 (Voice) or 581-2311 (TDD).

Next Up | P Inman & Cathy Eisenhower

Poets P Inman and Cathy Eisenhower will read in the New Writing Series on Thursday, October 11, at 4:30pm in the Arthur Hill Auditorium (Barrows Hall) on the University of Maine’s flagship campus in Orono. The event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited.

Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a librarian in Washington, DC, and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), and would with and (Roof 2009). She is co-translating the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and has co-curated the In Your Ear Reading Series for the past several years. Her work has recently appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.

P Inman was born in 1947 and grew up on Long Island. His publications include: Ocker (Tuumba Press, Berkeley); Red shift (Roof, New York); vel (O Books, Oakland); ad finitum (if p then q, Manchester, UK); and most recently, per se (Burning Deck, Providence). written, 1976-2012 is forthcoming from if p then q in 2013.

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On Facebook? Consider joining the NWS group here.

The UMaine New Writing Series is sponsored by the English Department and the National Poetry Foundationwith support from the Lloyd H. Elliott fund, the Milton Ellis Memorial Fund, the Honors College, and the Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series Committee. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Pulp & Paper Foundation for the use of the Soderberg Center. For more information contact Steve Evans at steven dot evans at maine dot edu or at 207-581-3818.

If you have a disability that requires accommodation for a NWS event, please contact Ann Smith in the office of Disability Support Service, 121 East Annex, 581-2319 (Voice) or 581-2311 (TDD).

Next Up | Ernesto Livon-Grosman in Milton Ellis Memorial Event

Ernesto Livon Grosman will present “Mapping the Americas,” a combination talk and bi-lingual reading, in the New Writing Series on Thursday, October 4, at 4:30pm in the Soderberg Center Auditorium (Jenness Hall) on the flagship campus of the University of Maine system in Orono. This event is free & open to the public, though seating is limited. UMaine Associate Professor Carla Billitteri, a member of the Poetry and Poetics faculty and an affiliate of the National Poetry Foundation, will introduce and host this special event commemorating the legacy of Milton Ellis.

Ernesto Livon-Grosman is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Cultures at Boston College. He is co-editor of The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, from Oxford University Press. He also has several ongoing digitalization projects; among them is Ailleurs, a journal on poetics and visual arts published in Paris by Uruguayan poet Carmelo Arden Quin during the early 1960s. The digitalization of Ailleurs is part of a larger project designed to make available, through the web, out of print South American journals dedicated to experimental writing. The first example of these efforts is XULdigital, a public project made possible thanks to O’Neill Library and Boston College.

Livon-Grosman was born and raised in Buenos Aires. In his early twenties, he moved to Patagonia, where he developed an interest in the history and the politics of that region. He later published Geografias imaginarias, a study about travel writers who created a mythical iconography of the Patagonian landscape, one in which the region is viewed as an uninhabited space despite the indigenous groups that have been living in the area for centuries. During the last military dictatorship, Livon-Grosman emigrated to Costa Rica. He went back to Argentina in 1983 after the return of the democratic government.

In addition to his work as a translator, scholar, and poet, Livon-Grosman also directed the film Cartoneros in 2006. The film uses the voice of a fictional narrator who comes back to Argentina after living many years abroad to tell the story of the new and expanding business of informal recycling as done by thousands of unemployed industrial workers. The film looks at a particular social crisis that was magnified by the financial breakdown of 2001 and inquires about the state of the long tradition of underground social organizations that have defined Argentina during the 20th century. How do people react to a crisis that sweeps aside all expectations of prosperity? What kind of alternative is possible in response to such a social and economic crisis? What does art have to say—if anything—about a process that challenges our sense of priorities? And what is this multi-million dollar informal activity telling us about what might be the ultimate environmental nightmare? These are some of the questions that Cartoneros would like to pose.

Thursday’s event marks the fifth annual Milton Ellis Memorial celebration. The Milton Ellis Memorial Fund was established in 2007 through a bequest from George H. Ellis (University of Maine ’41). Dr. Milton Ellis (1885-1947) was George Ellis’s father and a nationally known scholar and educator who long served as the English Department Chair at UMaine and edited the New England Quarterly between 1937-1945.

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On Facebook? Consider joining the NWS group here.

The UMaine New Writing Series is sponsored by the English Department and the National Poetry Foundationwith support from the Lloyd H. Elliott fund, the Milton Ellis Memorial Fund, the Honors College, and the Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series Committee. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Pulp & Paper Foundation for the use of the Soderberg Center. For more information contact Steve Evans at steven dot evans at maine dot edu or at 207-581-3818.

If you have a disability that requires accommodation for a NWS event, please contact Ann Smith in the office of Disability Support Service, 121 East Annex, 581-2319 (Voice) or 581-2311 (TDD).