The second edition of SPC’s Literary Lectures
Six Thursday nights in autumn at SPC, 1719 25th St., (25th and R in the arts complex) in Sacramento at 7:30 PM.

This series features lecturers:

Camille Norton, Chana Bloch, Rebecca Foust, Indigo Moor, Brad Buchanan, Kathryn Hohlwein, and Ann Keniston
Suggested donation of $45 for the entire series of six lectures or $10 for any one lecture.
Program managers, Lisa Jones and others will facilitate lectures. Frank Graham is the event director and organizer.
Contact Frank or Lisa for more more information.

SCHEDULE
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October 4; Ann Keniston

“The New American Poetry of Engagement: Politics and Contemporary Poetry”
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October 11; Indigo Moor

“Taming the Hydra: Writing in Many Genres — Poetry, Fiction, Playwriting, Scriptwriting”
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October 18; Camille Norton

“Adrienne Rich and the Politics of Lyric Poetry”
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October 25; Chana Bloch

“Learning from Translation”
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November 1; Kathryn Hohlwein and Brad Buchanan

“Understanding Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey”
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November 8; Rebecca Foust

“Rehabilitating the Maligned Cliche”
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BIOGRAPHIES

CAMILLE NORTON will present her lecture, “Adrienne Rich: A Life in Poetry” for Literary Lectures. Ms. Norton the author of “Corruption” — a National Poetry Series winner published by Harper Perennial in 2005. Her poem, “The Prison Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone,” appears in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler. She was co-editor, with Lou Robinson, of Resurgent: New Writing by Women (University of Illinois, 1992), an anthology of experimental writing by women working in film, art, and narrative. Her poetry has appeared in: The Colorado Review, Feminist Studies, The Georgia Review, The Greensboro Review, and Tiferet, among others. She earned her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts/Boston and received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Her honors and awards include The Grolier Prize in Poetry and a NEA fellowship at The MacDowell Colony. She has been awarded poetry residencies at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, The Ucross Foundation, Hedgebrook, Saint Mary’s College, Maryland, and Red Cinder. She is Professor of English at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

CHANA BLOCH will teach, “Learning from Translation” at Literary lectures. She’ll speak about experiences translating from Yiddish (poetry and prose: Glatstein, I B Singer) and Hebrew (biblical and contemporary: Song of Songs, Yehuda Amichai). Bloch gave the annual Stronach lecture at UC on the subject last year. Chana Bloch is Professor Emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the Creative Writing Program, she is the Poetry Editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty. Bloch has published four poetry collections, The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey. She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and his Open Closed Open, and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, and the author of a critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and many literary journals, as well as Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. Bloch’s book awards include the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for Blood Honey, selected by Jane Hirshfield; the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for Mrs. Dumpty, selected by Donald Hall; the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, together with Chana Kronfeld, for Open Closed Open; and the Book of the Year Award of the Conference on Christianity and Literature for Spelling the Word. Among her honors are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, in poetry and in translation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Writers Exchange Award of Poets & Writers, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Discovery Award of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. Bloch has held residencies at the Bellagio Center for Scholars and Artists, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Bloch has a B.A. from Cornell University, M.A. degrees in Judaic Studies and English Literature from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She has given poetry readings and lectures on her work at colleges and universities around the country, including Boston, Chicago, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Oberlin, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Wisconsin, and Yale.

ANN KENISTON will present her lecture, “Greedy Reading: Toward a New (and Practical) Theory of Literary Influence,” at SPC’S Literary Lectures, to open the series on October 4, 2012. Ms. Keniston is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, with a specialty in American Poetry.She is the author of a monograph, Overheard Voices:Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry (Routledge, 2006) and a collection of poems, The Caution of Human Gestures (David Robert Books, 2005).She is also coeditor (with Jeanne Follansbee Quinn) of Literature after 9/11 (Routledge, 2008). Recent poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Interim, Southwest Review, North American Review, and elsewhere; recent reviews and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review. Twice a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, she has received artists grants from the Somerville (MA) Arts Council, the Sierra Arts Foundation (NV), and the Nevada Arts Council. She is at work on a new collection of poems, provisionally entitled Lament/Praise, and a scholarly book, Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry, which considers the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Mark Doty, Susan Howe, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, and others. She lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband and two sons.

KATHRYN HOHLWEIN will be lecturing on the poetry of Homer at Literary Lectures in the autumn series. Ms. Hohlwein received her M.A. from the Bread Loaf School of English, of Middlebury College, Vermont. After a year on scholarships to France, where she studied Philosophy at Rennes, Bretagne and Spanish at the University of Santander in Spain, she moved to Lebanon, where she taught Literature at the Beirut College for Women. Hohlwein has taught for 35 years at the English Departments of the following Colleges and Universities: Beirut College for Women; Drake University, Des Moines; Mount Mary College; University of Wisconsin; Ohio State University; American River Community College, Sacramento, and California State University, Sacramento. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library of American Women at Harvard has requested her papers and letters for its permanent archive. Since retirement Kathryn Hohlwein founded and is the president of The Readers of Homer, a non-profit, tax exempt organization that produces night long audience participation readings of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in the US and around the world.

BRAD BUCHANAN is Chairman of the English Department at California State University, Sacramento, where he teaches creative writing as well as British and world literature. His poems have appeared in more than 100 journals, among them Canadian Literature, The Notre Dame Review, The Portland Review and The Seattle Review. His book of poems The Miracle Shirker was published in June of 2005 by Poet’s Corner Press. He maintains a poetry blog at www.miracleshirker.blogspot.com, and he served the Poetry Center as a board member and Managing Editor of Tule Review.

INDIGO MOOR’s appearance for Literary Lectures will focus on multi-genre writing: Poetry, Fiction, Playwriting, Scriptwriting, etc. Jane Hirshfield has said, “Indigo Moor’s work is sense-embedded, peeled to perceptive freshness, with a gift for the muscular and concentrating phrase.” Moor is an award-winning writer and teacher. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won the Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His first book, Tap-Root, was published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. His stageplay, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award. Mr. Moor is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program—where he studied poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting—and a graduate member of the Artist’s Residency Institute for Teaching Artists. Former vice president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, Indigo has served as editor for the Tule Review and the Lily Lit Review as well as judge for the SPC Book Contest. Indigo Moor has spent the last seven years lecturing and teaching creative writing workshops at conferences, residencies, and universities. He is the recipient of Indiana University’s Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a winner of The Jack Kerouac Poetry Contest. Additionally, Moor was a finalist for: the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Prize. Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Tretheway has said that Indigo Moor’s poems, “ache and tremble with urgency.”

REBECCA FOUST will present a craft lecture entitled “Rehabilitating the Maligned Cliche,” in which she will discuss why a cliche becomes a cliche to begin with and offer techniques for redeeming their value and potency in poetry writing, rather than just eliminating them wholesale as many poetry workshops instruct us to do. Foust was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Hollidaysburg, a tiny town surrounded by farmlands and forests, quarries and strip mines. She attended Smith College and Stanford Law School as a scholarship student. After practicing law in San Francisco for ten years, Foust worked as an advocate and grassroots political organizer for parents of kids with autism and other learning disorders. Her writing career began in 2007, in a memoir class taught by Linda Watanabee McFerrin at a Book Passage bookstore. She enrolled in Warren Wilson’s MFA program the following year and graduated in January 2010. Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes in consecutive year and were published in 2008 and 2009, and two full length poetry collections followed in 2010: All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Award), and God Seed, a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens. She is published in: Atlanta Review, Cincinnati Review, Hudson Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, North American Review, and Poetry Daily.