Early April News Round-Up
- Prof. Margaret Soltan has been asked to be part of the second cohort of professors to give lectures at Udemy, a new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Her first lecture, “Poetry and the Arrest of Life,” is here. (Scroll down to “poetry.”)
- Publisher’s Weekly gave Prof. Jane Shore‘s That Said: New and Selected Poems, a starred review. Here’s what the publication wrote:
In Shore’s first retrospective collection, fortunes and fairy tales converge with real experiences—a daughter growing up, a mother’s death, an aging father, a young classmate killed in an accident—juxtaposing life as imagined against life as it turns out: “It didn’t weep the way a willow should,” the book begins, “Planted all alone in the middle of the field/ by the bachelor who sold our house to us.” Shore reflects on the passage of time—complete with Chinese take-out, Scrabble, and dolls of all kinds (American Girl and otherwise)—through poised ruminations on selfhood. In “The Russian Doll,” Shore writes, “I thought the first, the largest, doll/ contained nothing but herself,/ but I was wrong./ I assumed that she was young/ because I could not read her face./ Is she the oldest in this matriarchy—/ holding within her hollow each daughter’s/ daughter? Or the youngest—// carrying the embryo of the old woman/ she will become?” And at their best, these poems are deliberate, curious, and as unassuming as Bishop’s. Shore does what the best memoirists attempt: in describing one life, she describes the condition of all lives. (Apr.)
Reviewed on: 03/23/2012
- Prof. Faye Moskowitz was recently honored by the University for 25 years of service. She was awarded a crystal apple at the 2nd Annual Faculty Honors Ceremony on March 29. At the same ceremony, Prof. Gayle Wald was honored for receiving at 2012-13 National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship.
- Prof. Jennifer James, who also serves as Program Director of Africana Studies, recently participated in a symposium discussing Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager whose murder has led to a national discussion on race, racial profiling, and the criminal justice system.
