Events

To prescribe a set method for poetic closure is to deny that any good poem creates a distinct relationship with its reader that it must therefore conclude on its own terms. A poem can strand its reader at an intersection or slam its door in the reader’s face. Some poems lead their readers right back through the doors they initially entered. Other poems shut their doors quietly behind them, while others still prefer to leave their doors slightly ajar. This seminar will explore a number of poems that employ closure as a means to invite the reader to re-enter, revisit and ultimately re-envision the preceding body of the text. How, as writers, can we move our readers into regions of awareness that lie beyond mere epiphany?

Cate Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine. Event Horizon, her fourth collection, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2022.

This event is colloquium credit eligible. Register HERE for the Zoom livestream.

A discussion of the legacy of Roberto Bolaño, arguably the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since Borges. Bolaño died at 50, leaving an unfathomable body of literary works, including By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives, and the manuscript of 2666, a thousand-page unfinished masterpiece considered one of the most influential Latin American novels of all time.  

Eduardo Lago: MA, Universidad de Madrid. PhD, Graduate Center, CUNY. Special interests: the connections between North American, Latin American and European literatures. Author of the award-winning novel, Call Me Brooklyn (2006), translated into 18 languages. Other fiction works include Scattered Tales and Map Thief (short-story collections) and I Always Knew I Would See You Again, Aurora Lee, a novel —all in Spanish. Translator of works by John Barth, Sylvia Plath, Henry James, Junot Díaz, Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, and Charles Brockden-Brown. Recipient of the 2002 Bartolomé March Award for Excellence in Literary Criticism for his comparative analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses translations into Spanish. Director of the Cervantes Institute in New York, 2006–2011. Holder of a Chair of Excellence at Carlos III University, Madrid, in 2008. His most recent books are Walt Whitman No Longer Lives Here: Essays on North American Literature (2018) and We Are All Leopold Bloom: Reasons (Not) To Read Ulysses (2022). La estela de Selkirk [Selkirks Wake], his latest novel, will be published in Spain in May 2025. He has taught in the Languages Department at Sarah Lawrence since 1993.

This event is colloquium credit eligible.

Memory is the writer's raw material and the very foundation of identity. But do we know anything, truly, about how memory works? This craft talk will look at how novelists, neurologists, and historians have understood memory as practice and as process, and what they might teach us about working with its vagaries.

Parul Sehgal is a critic-at-large at the New York Times. Previously, she was a staff writer at The New Yorker and a book critic at the Times. She has won awards for her criticism from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the New York Press Club, and the National Book Critics Circle. She teaches in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.

This event is colloquium credit eligible.