Acclaimed writers Kwame Dawes, Teresa de la Caridad Doval, Lorna Goodison, Francisco Goldman and critic J. Edward Chamberlin will all visit Vanderbilt University in March to take part in a creative writing symposium.
The March 14-15 symposium is titled “Dancing Between Two (or More) Cultures: Writers of the Caribbean, Central America and the United States.”
The visitors will read from their work and engage in conversation with Vanderbilt faculty, students, members of the community and each other about literature and literary lives that span more than one culture. Book signings will follow many of the events.
“For us, the symposium is a wonderful way to further vital conversations about culture, language and art in the Americas, and to spotlight the contributions of these internationally distinguished poets, fiction writers and scholars,” said Nancy Reisman, assistant professor of English and organizer of the conference with Lorraine Lopez, assistant professor of English. “We hope their presence will also draw together attendees from across the campus and from the greater Nashville community.”
The symposium, part of the Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series, is free and open to the public.
Scheduled events include:
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14:
3 p.m. in the auditorium of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center: a panel discussion on Caribbean poetry featuring Dawes, Goodison and Chamberlin, and moderated by Sean Goudie, assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt.
4:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities: a reception for all symposium attendees.
6 p.m. in Room 101 of Buttrick Hall: readings by Lorna Goodison and Kwame Dawes.
THURSDAY, MARCH 15:
3 p.m. in the auditorium of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center: A conversation about prose writers in Cuba, Guatemala and the United States with Doval and Goldman, and moderated by William Luis, the Chancellor‘s Professor of Spanish.
6 p.m. in Room 101 of Buttrick Hall: Readings by Goldman and Doval, with a reception to follow.
Creative Writing Symposium
Visiting Writers/Scholars:
Kwame Senu Neville Dawes has published eight collections of poetry, Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree 1994), Resisting the Anomie (Goose Lane 1995), Prophets (Peepal Tree 1996), and Shook Foil (Peepal Tree 1998). His most recent collection, Midland, was recently awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by the Ohio University Press (2001). Since 1992, he has been teaching at the University of South Carolina. He is a professor in English on the Columbia campus of that institution, where he is Distinguished Poet in Residence and director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.
Teresa de la Caridad Doval is a novelist and memoirist. She teaches at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is the author of two novels, A Girl Like Che Guevara (Soho Press 2003) and Poesas (The Possessed Women), a novel in Spanish which was published by Pureplay Press in 2002. She is at work completing a memoir of her life in Cuba and a novel in English.
Lorna Goodison has received international recognition for her poetry, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and
Jamaica‘s Musgrave Gold Medal (1999). She is the author of 10 collections of poems: Tamarind Season (1980), I Am Becoming My Mother (1986), Heartease (1988), Poems (1989), Selected Poems (1992), To Us All Flowers Are Roses (1995), Turn Thanks (1999), Guinea Woman (2000), Traveling Mercies (2001), and Controlling the Silver (2005). She has also published two collections of short stories. She is associate professor in the University of Michigan‘s Department of English and Department of African American Studies.
Francisco Goldman is the author of three novels: The Long Night of White Chickens, which won the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction; The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband, published in 2005. His novels have been published in 10 languages. As contributing editor for Harper‘s, he covered Central America in the 1980‘s. In 2007, he will publish Who Didn‘t Kill the Bishop? The Story of a Perfect Crime, a non-fiction work on the Bishop Gerardi murder case in Guatemala.
J. Edward Chamberlin is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He was the senior research associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and has worked extensively on native land claims around the world. His books include Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, and The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes Towards Native Americans.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu