We begin 2013 with our first redesign in decades. Take a look, and read Ann Fabian on the sad life of pioneering herpetologist Mary Cynthia Dickerson and Zhanna Vaynberg on growing up between cultures, along with fiction by Cody Peace Adams, Kim Adrian, Morris Collins, Jen Fawkes, Stephanie Friedman, and William Kelly Woolfitt; a review of Witold Gombrowicz by Piotr Florczak; and poetry by Marianne Boruch. From the Desert Wars,â is a special section of startling and deeply felt poetry written by American soldiers fresh from Iraq and Afghanistan,âtrying to make sense of things,â including work by Benjamin Busch, Clint Garner, Bruce Lack, Hugh Martin, and Patrick Whalen.Congrats to alum Zhanna Vaynberg, who has six essays in the new MQR! Tweet
Announcing the student project showcase for Cultures and Communities core course Art 150, “Multicultural America”!
Many of CC’s core courses feature innovative opportunities for students to complete projects through which they reflect on the combination of community engagement, academic study, and critical self-exploration that make the course unique. Art 150 students use a variety of media for their projects, which will be on view May 14 in a showcase at the Library Learning Commons classroom A. Stop by!
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Alumnus Chris Fink to read from his wonderful debut fiction, FARMER’S ALMANAC, Friday, April 26!
From the Boswell Books site:
Chris Fink, author of Farmer’s Almanac: A Work of Fiction
Friday April 26, at 7:00 pm
“Farmer’s Almanac is one of the most evocative collections I’ve read on the limitations and hard pleasures of small-town rural life, and manual labor. Chris Fink writes beautifully about characters who, when set upon by the limitations of where they live, adapt, and then discover that every so often, as a reward, the world will open up to them.”—Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad
In Chris Fink’s debut work of fiction, America’s rural core is cracked open to reveal moments of stark beauty and cruelty. Farmer’s Almanac—a new Midwestern Gothic—is an imaginary handbook for rural living, as timeless and essential as its namesake. But this is no American pastoral. Fink’s vision is more Orwell than Rockwell. Not since Winesburg, Ohio has a book so thoroughly plumbed the Midwestern character. A despairing farmer milks a dead cow, a baseball phenom chooses between the diamond and the dairy barn, and in the back of the school bus, a young girl fights back against her tormentors. Farmer’s Almanac reports the news from mythical Odette County, Wisconsin, where the milk prices keep falling, and the forecast is not good.
About the Author: Chris Fink is a professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin,where he teaches literature, creative writing, and journalism. He is the editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal.
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For more, see this excellent interview with the author himself…
Please join us for The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a lecture by Dr. Jeanne Theoharis, author of the newly released biography from Beacon Press
Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Time: 3:00-3:50 p.m.
Place: Englemann Hall, Room 105, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2033 East Hartford Ave., Milwaukee, WI
Sponsored by The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the following UWM departments or programs: Cultures and Communities, Women’s Studies, History, Africology, English and the Student Union Programming and Union Socio-Cultural Programming.
When Rosa Parks died in 2005, she became the first woman and second African American to lie in honor in the Capitol rotunda, where forty thousand Americans paid tribute to her passing. Yet, argues professor Jeanne Theoharis, Parks’s iconization by a nation eager to place the civil rights movement firmly in the past, has reduced her contributions to a single act on a bus, rather than a lifetime of political service. “Theoharis details Parks as a radical, independent, careful and lifelong activist who has been unfairly frozen in a single time and place: 1955 Montgomery. [She] liberates Parks from this singular moment and finally asks the questions that previous journalists and scholars seemed insufficiently curious to ask. And the answers will surprise readers,” writes Melissa Harris-Perry, Host of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry.”
Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She received her AB in Afro-American studies from Harvard College and a PhD in American culture from the University of Michigan. She is the author or coauthor of six books and numerous articles on the black freedom struggle and the contemporary politics of race in the United States.
TweetSpecifically, Prof. Kalter was honored for his book, “Modern Antiques”; the award will be presented in the fall here on campus.
The award itself, in the words of the Graduate School, “recognizes a publication that serves as testimony to the author’s comprehensive grasp of the subject(s) of inquiry and research and, in turn, outstanding scholarship. The faculty member will have demonstrated outstanding research in the Humanities and will have made substantive contributions to humanistic thought through a monograph or other scholarly work published during the two years prior to the award year. In each odd-numbered year, the Graduate School solicits nominations of Humanities faculty members in the Departments of Africology; Art History; Communication, English; Foreign Languages and Literature; French, Italian, and Comparative Literature; Linguistics; History; Philosophy; Spanish and Portuguese for the award.”
Congratulations, Prof. Kalter!
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UWM Women’s Studies Program Feminist Lecture Series Presents:
Evelyn Alsultany
“Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Patriotic Arab Americans, Oppressed Muslim Women and Sympathetic Feelings”
Friday, April 19, 2013
1:30pm – 3pm
Greene Hall
Evelyn Alsultany is an Associate Professor in the American Culture Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (2012) and co-editor of two books, Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (2011) and Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (2013). Professor Alsultany is guest curator of the Arab American National Museum’s online exhibit, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes.
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This talk is part of the UWM Arab and American: Literature/Media/Gender/Cultural Politics lecture series (English, Women’s Studies, Cultures and Communities, Center for 21st Century Studies, History, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Geography, Comparative Literature) and sponsored by the UWM Women’s Studies Program, the William F. Vilas Trust Fund, and UWM Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies. This event is free and open to the public.
For more information contact the Women’s Studies Program at 229-5918.
Friday, April 19, 7pm
Greene Hall
We’ll have two awesome readers, and there will be sneak peek readings of some of our favorite poems from the upcoming issue. The bios of our readers are posted below, in case they are useful:
RICHIE HOFMANN is a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow and an MFA student in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His poems appear or are forthcoming in cream city review, Ploughshares, the New Republic, Poetry, and the New Yorker. His poetic sequence, “Old World Elegy,” winner of the Memorious Art Song Contest, in a setting by composer Brian Baxter, will premiere at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in May 2013.
GREG WRENN’S first book of poems, Centaur, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2013 Brittingham Prize and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Born and raised in northeast Florida, Wrenn is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and a recipient of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America as well as the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has appeared in New England Review, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis, he is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
TweetWednesday, April 17, 4:30-6:30 pm Curtin 175
UW-Milwaukee & Marquette University’s Writing Center Tutors present, “Tutors Research: Within Writing Centers and Beyond”
Outstanding Writing Center tutors (including English grad student Amy Zandler) will discuss their recent work, nationally recognized at the Conference on College Composition and the Nat’l Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. Sponsored by UWM’s Writing Center and the Milwaukee Writing Center Consortium.
Contact Margie Mika for more info. (mmika@uwm.edu)
Tweet(7p @ Boswell Books)
Evoking Jon Krakauer, Dead Run is the extraordinary true story of desperado survivalists, a brutal murder, and vigilante justice set against the harsh backdrop of the Colorado wilderness.
On a sunny May morning in 1998 in Cortez, Colorado, three desperados in a stolen truck opened fire on the town cop, shooting him twenty times; then they blasted their way past dozens of police cars and disappeared into 10,000 square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North American continent. Self-trained survivalists, the outlaws eluded the most sophisticated law enforcement technology on the planet and a pursuit force that represented more than seventy-five local, state, and federal police agencies with dozens of swat teams, U.S. Army Special Forces, and more than five hundred officers from across the country. Dead Run is the first in-depth account of this sensational case, replete with overbearing local sheriffs, Native American trackers, posses on horseback, suspicion of vigilante justice and police cover-ups, and the blunders of the nation’s most exalted crime-fighters pursuing outlaws into territory in which only they could survive.
About the Author: Dan Schultz is an award-winning writer and journalist. He received his M.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota and worked as a reporter and feature writer for daily newspapers in Minnesota and Oregon, covering crime stories before he began writing for magazines and television. After living in Aspen, Colorado, for several years, he and his wife, Lynda, now split their time between their Chicago home and the Colorado mountains.
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