Fall 2019

Film | Chicago’s Black Arts Movement
Thabiti Lewis & Pavithra Narayanan

Wednesday, September 11th
5:00 p.m.
Fine Arts Building, Room 5062
WSU-Pullman Campus
Free and open to the public

“Black Chicago is the epicenter of our diaspora because the roots are deep and they stay,” says Carol Adams, former CEO of the DuSable Museum, in the film BAM! Chicago’s Black Arts Movement. Professor Thabiti Lewis and Professor Pavithra Narayanan of Washington State University-Vancouver, who directed BAM! Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, will screen the documentary film on the WSU-Pullman campus. The film, which draws on extensive interviews with Adams and many others, looks back at the history of Chicago’s BAM and reflects on the artists and institutions that have extended its impact in the decades since the Black Arts Movement was at its height in the city. Q&A with the filmmakers to follow.

Co-sponsored by ASWSU and the Common Reading Program. Common Reading stamp available.

Literary Reading & Workshop
Terese Marie Mailhot

Literary Reading | Q&A
Friday, October 4th
6:30 p.m.
Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center
WSU-Pullman Campus
Free and open to the public

Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Pacific Standard, Granta, Mother Jones, Medium, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir. Her book was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction, and was selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018. Heart Berries was also listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and was one of Harper’s Bazaar Best Books of 2018. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, the Electra Quinney Award for Published Stories, a Clara Johnson Award, and she is the recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University.

Workshop, Memoir Writing, 1-credit
Saturday, October 5th
8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall

In this one-day intensive workshop, students will learn the art and craft of memoir writing. Open to WSU students of all majors, the 1-credit course includes attending Ms. Mailhot’s reading on Friday, October 4, one full day of workshop with Ms. Mailhot on Saturday, October 5, and purchasing and reading her book Heart Berries: A Memoir before the workshop begins. To enroll, contact Leisa McCormick (lmccormick@wsu.edu) in Avery Hall 202.

Co-sponsored by ASWSU and the Common Reading Program. Common Reading stamp available.

Poetry Reading | Q&A
Jericho Brown

Friday, November 8th
6:30 p.m.
Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center
WSU-Pullman Campus
Free and open to the public

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019). His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Co-sponsored by ASWSU and the Common Reading Program. Common Reading stamp available.

Spring 2020

Community Workshop & Literary Reading
Patrick Coleman

Community Workshop
Wednesday, February 5
3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
WSU-Pullman Campus
Free and open to the public

In this free, community workshop, writer, artist, and curator Patrick Coleman will lead a generative writing workshop based on works currently exhibited in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. All are welcome.

Literary Reading | Q&A
Thursday, February 6
3:00 p.m.
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
WSU-Pullman Campus
Free and open to the public

Patrick Coleman writes short stories, which have been published in Hobart, ZYZZYVA, Zócalo Public Square, the Writer’s Chronicle, the Black Warrior Review, Juked, and the Utne Reader. He also writes poetry; his first collection, Fire Season, was published by Tupelo Press in 2018 and was awarded the 2015 Berkshire Prize. Patrick works as the Assistant Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego, and through his work he enjoys exploring the relationship between visual arts and music. His first novel, The Churchgoer, was published by Harper Perennial on July 20, 2019.

Co-sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, ASWSU, and the Common Reading Program. Common Reading stamp available.

Speculative Fiction Workshop & Reading/Performance
Petra Kuppers

Speculative Fiction Workshop, 1-credit
Tuesday, March 31 – Thursday, April 2
5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall

In this workshop, students will engage in a series of somatic movement and writing prompts geared toward learning the art and craft of speculative fiction, with a focus on “solar punk,” (a subgenre of science fiction. Open to WSU students of all majors, the 1-credit course includes attending Kuppers’ literary reading and reading a selection of short fiction to be distributed before the workshop begins. To enroll, contact Leisa McCormick (lmccormick@wsu.edu) in Avery Hall 202.

Reading/Performance | Q&A
Wednesday, April 1
5:00 p.m.
Location TBA
WSU-Pullman Campus
Free and open to the public

Petra Kuppers is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She uses somatic and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She has many awards and publications to her name, most recently being Ice Bar, speculative queer/crip and solar punk short stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), the Star Trek-y poetry chapbook Green Orion Woman (dancing girl, 2018), and the poetry collection Gut Botany. She has also written academic books on disability arts and culture, medical humanities, ecopoetics, and community performance. She and her partner, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, founded Turtle Disco, an experimental movement and writing space, in Michigan. Petra is a Fellow at the Black Earth Institute; she also teaches on the Low-Residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, and she is the Artistic Director of an international disability performance collective, The Olimpias.

Co-sponsored by the WSU Center for Arts and Humanities, ASWSU, and the Common Reading Program. Common Reading stamp available.