TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice

TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice
presents talks/manifestos by

ROBERT REID-PHARR

STEPHEN MOTIKA

SAMUEL ACE

…followed by a discussion/Q&A

November 21
at 7 PM
Free admission

at CUNY Graduate Center
in the Skylight Room (9100)
365 Fifth Avenue, NYC

What are the new poetics and the new manifestos? What do authors actually do when they write, and what can be learned from their investigations? This series of talks on queer poetics, titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the intersection of queer writing, the manifesto, poetic practice, and pedagogy.

A Distinguished and Presidential Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, ROBERT FITZGERALD REID-PHARR holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to the Graduate Center he was an assistant and associate professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. In addition, he has been the Edward Said Visiting Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford, the Carlisle and Barbara Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and the Frederic Ives Carpenter Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. A specialist in African American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, he has published three books and numerous articles in, among other places, American Literature, American Literary History, Callaloo, Afterimage, Small Axe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Women and Performance, Social Text, Transition, Studies in the Novel, The African American Review, and Radical America. His research and writing have been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.

STEPHEN MOTIKA is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrival and At Mono (2007) and In the Madrones (2011). His first book, Western Practice, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2012. Recent work has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Eleven Eleven, The Boog City Reader 4, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. The Field, his collaboration with visual artist Dianna Frid, was on view at Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2003. A 2010-20122 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident, he is currently the program director at Poets House and publisher of Nightboat Books.

SAMUEL ACE has published widely in periodicals and journals, including Ploughshares, EOAGH, Nimrod, The Prose Poem, an International Journal, and the Kenyon Review. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Stealth, co-authored with Maureen Seaton (Chax Press), Normal Sex (Firebrand Books) and Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Hard Press). He is a two-time finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in poetry. He currently lives in Tucson, AZ and Truth or Consequences, NM.

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TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice is curated by Tim Peterson (Trace). All events are co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), the Ph.D. Program in English, and the GC Poetics Group.