Fall 2020 WSU Visiting Writers Series

Ross Gay Poetry Reading

Thursday October 15, 2020 | 7:00 pm PST
YouTube Live | Free and open to the public | No registration necessary

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays,The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. His new book, Be Holding, will be released this coming fall. Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook “Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens,” in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, “River.”  He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press.  Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

We are grateful to our collaborators for Ross Gay’s visit: 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.

Spring 2021 WSU Visiting Writers Series

Chigozie Obioma Fiction Reading

February 10, 2021 | 7:00 pm PST
YouTube Live | Free and open to the public | No registration necessary

Chigozie Obioma is the author of The Fishermen, which was a finalist for the Man Booker prize 2015, and a winner of four other awards, including an NAACP Image award, the FT/Oppenheimer prize for fiction, and several nominations. The novel, which is being translated in 26 languages, is also being adapted into a stage play. Obioma was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Influential People of 2015. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities was published in January 2019 to wide acclaim and is being translated into 18 languages. The novel was also a finalist for the Booker prize, making Obioma one of only two writers in history to be a finalist for all their published books. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and in Nigeria where where he runs various projects.

We are grateful to our collaborators for Chigozie Obioma’s visit: 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-Pullman Dean’s Office, College of Arts and Sciences; WSU Common Reading Program; ASWSU; Landescapes, The Student Literary Journal.

Major Jackson Poetry Reading

March, 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 Jackson 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 included in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. Major Jackson 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.

C.S. Giscombe Poetry & Memoir Reading and Workshop

April 2021|7 pm PST
Free and open to the public

C.S. Giscombe is author of many books, including the forthcoming Similarly, four poetry volumes and a selection of new poems. 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). Poetry and prose 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 a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

1-Credit Workshop: Writing as Social Practice

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.

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