Spring 2021 WSU Visiting Writers Series

Major Jackson Poetry Reading

March 1, 2021 | 7:00 pm PST
YouTube Live | Free and open to the public | No registration necessary

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man(2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and was included in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. Major lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the poetry editor of The Harvard Review.

We are grateful to our collaborators for Major Jackson’s Reading and Workshop: WSU-Vancouver Office of Equity and Diversity; WSU-Vancouver Office of Student Equity and Outreach; WSU-Vancouver Office of Academic Affairs; WSU-Vancouver College of Arts and Sciences; WSU-Tri-Cities Writing Center; WSU Common Reading Program; ASWSU; Landescapes, The Student Literary Journal.

Catina Bacote Nonfiction Reading

March 16, 2021 | 6:00 pm PST
YouTube Live | Free and open to the public | No registration necessary

Catina Bacote is a writer and assistant professor of English at St. John’s University. She specializes in creative nonfiction and her work draws on personal story and social history. Her current research investigates the consequences of economic oppression and residential segregation, and her book project chronicles the lasting impact of the illegal drug trade on her family and community. Her essays have been published in Ploughshares, Tin House, the Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Common, The Sun, the Southern California Review, Gulf Coast, December Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Kweli, and the anthology This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017). She has been a writer-in-residence at the MacDowell colony where she received the Ann Cox Chambers Long-form Journalism Fellowship, the Ragdale Foundation where she received the Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellowship, Hedgebrook, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony, Willapa Bay, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Brush Creek Foundation.

Catina Bacote’s visit is part of the Creative Writing Speaker Series~English 499 offered through Washington State University Vancouver. Special thanks to Pavithra Narayanan and Chelsea Ratzlaff. Sponsors: WSU Vancouver Library, WSU Vancouver Academic Affairs, WSU Vancouver College of Arts and Sciences, WSU Vancouver Council on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, WSU Common Reading Program.

C.S. Giscombe Poetry & Memoir Reading and Workshop

March 23, 2021|7:00 pm PST
YouTube Live | Free and open to the public | No registration necessary

C.S. Giscombe is the author of many books, including the forthcoming Similarly, four poetry volumes, and a selection of new poems. His most recent books are Ohio Railroads (2014, a long poem in the form of an essay, including maps), Border Towns (2016, essays having to do with poetry), and Overlapping Apexes (2017, a long poem). Earlier books include Prairie Style (2008), the memoir Into and Out of Dislocation (2000), and Giscome Road(1998). Giscombe’s poetry and prose has been reprinted in Best American Poetry, Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Bluesprint: Black British Columbia Literature and Orature, and elsewhere. Poetry books in progress are Negro Mountain and Train Music, a collaboration with the painter and collagist Judith Margolis chronicling the cross-country train trip the two made together in 2017 and an inquiry into the social spaces of white supremacy. Giscombe has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry. His work earned the 2010 Stephen Henderson Award in Poetry and the 1998 Carl Sandburg Prize. He has taught at Cornell, Syracuse University, Illinois State University, Pennsylvania State University and currently is the Robert Haas Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

1-Credit Workshop: Writing as Social Practice

March 22-24, 2021, 6:00-8:30 p.m. PST | Zoom | Open to WSU students

One of the ideas behind this course taught by C.S. Giscombe is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative nonfiction, “essaying,” etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation, both value experimental approaches, and both traffic with versions of the incomplete. Another idea is that various wide particulars make up each of us—social class, race, ability, gender, place of birth, etc. These particulars endow us with privileges, deficits, blindnesses, insights, and the like. Prompts in this course will encourage students to document these and explore how they qualify us (and how or if they obligate us) to “speak” from various positions. The purpose of writing in this course is to engage public language on the one hand and personal (meaning specific) observations and experiences on the other. The purpose here is to pursue consciousness. The experiment is to attempt to do so in the forms of poetry and the personal essay. A third idea is that hybrid forms—works that defy a single characterization or order, works that join rather than exclude—are of great interest. To register, contact Leisa McCormick at: lmccormick@wsu.edu or 509-335-0496.

We are grateful to our collaborators for C.S. Giscombe’s Reading and Workshop: WSU-Vancouver Office of Equity and Diversity; WSU-Vancouver Office of Student Equity and Outreach; WSU-Vancouver Office of Academic Affairs; WSU-Vancouver College of Arts and Sciences; WSU-Tri-Cities Writing Center; WSU Common Reading Program; ASWSU; Landescapes, The Student Literary Journal.

An Evening with Mahogany L. Browne

April 7, 2021 | 6:00 pm PST
YouTube Live | Free and open to the public | No registration necessary

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer, and educator. She is the interim executive director of Urban Word NYC and Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, and Rauschenberg. She is the author of Chlorine Sky (2021), Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice (2020), Black Girl Magic (2020), Woke Baby (2018), and Kissing Caskets (2017). Browne is also the founder of Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diversity literature campaign), and as an Arts for Justice grantee, is completing her first book of essays on mass incarceration, investigating its impact on women and children. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Mahogany L. Browne’s visit is part of the Creative Writing Speaker Series~English 499 offered through Washington State University Vancouver. Special thanks to Pavithra Narayanan and Chelsea Ratzlaff. Sponsors: WSU Vancouver Library, WSU Vancouver Academic Affairs, WSU Vancouver College of Arts and Sciences, WSU Vancouver Council on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, WSU Common Reading Program.

Debra Magpie Earling Fiction Reading

April 12, 2021 | 6:00 pm PST
YouTube Live | Free and open to the public | No registration necessary

Debra Magpie Earling is a Native American novelist and short story writer, and professor of English at the University of Montana, Missoula. Earling is a member of the Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. She is the author of Perma Red (2002) and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (2012). Her first novel Perma Red won the Western Writers Association Spur Award, WWA’s Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award, and the American Book Award. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, a collaboration with photographer Peter Rutledge Koch, re-invents the life of Sacajewea, the Shoshone guide in the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Debra Magpie Earling’s visit is part of the Creative Writing Speaker Series~English 499 offered through Washington State University Vancouver. Special thanks to Pavithra Narayanan and Chelsea Ratzlaff. Sponsors: WSU Vancouver Library, WSU Vancouver Academic Affairs, WSU Vancouver College of Arts and Sciences, WSU Vancouver Council on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, WSU Common Reading Program.

Congratulations to Jericho Brown, 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner!

Jericho was our last in-person visitor for Spring 2020 held in the Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center on the WSU-Pullman Campus

Snaps from previous events held in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on WSU-Pullman Campus