RALPH SALISBURY
Reading at Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust Street
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53212
Saturday, June 2, 7pm
$5-$8
Rockefeller Bellagio Award winner Ralph Salisbury’s book-length memoir, So Far So Good (winner of the 2012 Riverteeth Literary Nonfiction Award), is scheduled for publication by University of Nebraska Press in 2013. His three books of short fiction and ten books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage. He has presented his work on stage, on radio, and on TV, in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and India. His poem “In the Children’s Museum in Nashville” was published in the New Yorker in 1960, and has attracted attention as a precursor to the contemporary Native American literary movement. In selecting his 2000 book Rainbows of Stone as an Oregon Book Award finalist in poetry, Maxine Kumin wrote: “Nature in Ralph Salisbury’s conception is a Presence to be addressed…. His book deserves a broad audience.” His most recent books are Blind Pumper at the Well, (Salt Publishing); The Indian Who Bombed Berlin, (Michigan State University Press), and Light from a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected (Silverfish Review Press), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Born of a Cherokee-Shawnee story-teller/singer father and a story-telling Irish American mother, he grew up hunting and trapping, for meat and pelts, and working on his family’s farm, which had no electricity or running water. Through Air Force service during World War II, he earned six years of university education; since 1950 he has worked at writing, editing, translating and teaching writing and literature.
Though he has lived and worked among the intelligentsia of many nations, his writing comes from being a questing, mixed-race, working-class individual in a violent world, and he says that his work is offered to the spirit of human goodness, which unites all people in the eternal struggle against evil, a struggle to prevail against global extinction.
For more information on Ralph Salisbury, visit his website at http://www.ralphsalisbury.com/
For more information about Ralph’s visit to Woodland Pattern, call 414.263.5001, or visit http://www.woodlandpattern.org/
Prof. Lane Hall writes, “Lisa Moline and I invite you to the opening of Surface Tension NYC presented at Eyebeam as part of World Science Festival June 1st, 2012. We have a large collaborative installation which was first produced here in Milwaukee, was recreated in Dublin last October, and will now be at Eyebeam (which we are really excited about due to its position within the “art and tech” community). Each iteration of our piece is focussed on water biology, conditions and politics specific to the area’s watershed….”
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Sherwin Bitsui
Saturday, May 26, 7pm
$8/$7/$6
Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/woodlandpattern#!/events/223886787725699/
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust St., Milwaukee, WI 53212
414.263.5001
woodlandpattern.org
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to the American Book Award which he won for his second book Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), he is also the recipient of a Tucson MOCA Local Genius Award, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship.
The Poetry Foundation describes Bitsui’s poems as “imagistic” and “surreal,” which is not surprising considering that he is also a painter and photographer who sometimes considers all of his work as a singular expression: “I see English, or language in general, as a medium, much like a painter would view paint or a sculptor would view marble,” said Bitsui in an interview with Christopher Nelson. The poet Arthur Sze, who was one of Bitsui’s teachers at the Institute of American Indian Arts, extrapolates: “[Bitsui’s] images oftentimes depict a world-out-of-balance. Indeed, his work struggles with the tension between Diné and English, between the desire to restore a balance with the natural world and the recognition of how ineluctable the forces of twentieth century technology are.”
Here’s a link to some of his book-length poem, Flood Song, up at Woodland Pattern’s website: http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/sherwin_bitsui01.shtml
Congrats to Sarah Etlinger, who graduated Sunday and now has a tenure-track job at Rock Valley College…
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Returning the Gift Conference Volunteer meeting today at 6pm at UWM in Bolton Hall, Room 196.
“Whether you’re willing to chair a session, pick up a writer at the airport, distribute broadsides at Indian Summer, hand-out name tags, run a committee (food, transportation, publicity), all help is appreciated! There will be opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to interact with writers and publishers and for creative writing grad students to participate in manuscript reviews for emerging writers. Also, this is a lovely way to support writers in general, upon whom much of our research, teaching, and scholarship rely. If you have students you know will be around in the summer, please let them know about this opportunity. Web gurus needed! Creative writers needed! Milwaukee savvy folks needed! Please circulate this email broadly.
Volunteers, please come to the May meeting or email Kim Blaeser (kblaeser@uwm.edu) or Michael Wilson (michael@uwm.edu) for more information.
Link to website featuring RTG info: http://yukhika-latuhse.org/”
From a press release we’ve just received:
“Madison Poets and Chazen Museum of Art
Establish the Bridge Poetry Series
Madison, WI—Madison poets Katrin Talbot, Sara Parrell, Susan Elbe, and Jesse Lee Kercheval have launched the Bridge Poetry Series in collaboration with the Chazen Museum of Art. This series creates a unique venue for poetry in Madison and highlights ekphrastic poetry, or poetry about works of art. Twice yearly, about a dozen Wisconsin poets will be invited to write poems inspired by works in one of the museum’s temporary exhibition, directly linking art and poetry. A public reading will be held in the galleries. The project’s intent is to build a bridge between art forms and also between poets all over Wisconsin to bring together and celebrate a diverse range of style, affiliation, age, and ethnicity.
The first reading, on May 17, 2012, at 7 p.m., will be in response to Spark and Flame: 50 Years of Art Glass and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Invited poets include Brenda Cárdenas (current Milwaukee poet laureate), Lisa Cihlar, Cliff Dillhunt, Bruce Dethlefsen (current Wisconsin poet laureate), Zaccaria Fulton, Kevin Gonzalez, Matt Guenette, Daniel Kunene, Eve Robillard, Katrin Talbot, Ron Wallace, and Timothy Yu. The exhibition marks the fiftieth anniversary of the studio glass movement, and the program founded at the UW–Madison by Harvey Littleton. The exhibition will be on view April 21 to August 5, 2012. The reading will open with a brief presentation about the exhibition. Poems will be published on the Chazen’s website.
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Above: Department Chair Liam Callanan
Teaching Excellence Awards
Jessica Nastal, Graduate Teaching Assistant
Christopher Lyons, Academic Staff
The Sheila Roberts Prize
Mollie Boutell: “Intimates”
The Ellen Hunnicut Prize
Kathryn Nesheim: “Four Thousand Twenty-Four”
UWM Poetry Manuscript Award
1st Place: Brittany Cavallaro
Runner Up: Ellen Caswell
The Wladyslaw Cieszynski Literary Prize
Joseph Rein: “Encyclopaedia Alanica”
Colleen Abel: “Hypatia”
The Academy of American Poets
Colleen Abel: “The Sleep Suite”
The William Harrold Memorial Award
Brittany Cavallaro: “Personal History”
The Faculty Fiction Award
Richard Sweitzer
Frederick J Hoffman Award
Michael Sanders: “‘Our Mechanic Dance’: The Dynamics of Body Movement in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Theory of Flight’”
Rachael Sullivan: “The Dam as Monument of Latourian Possibility in Muriel Rukeyser’s Body of Waking”
Alice Gillam Award
Kristin Ravel
Tinsley Helton Dissertation Fellowship
Paige Conley
James A. Sappenfield Fellowship
Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine, Avery Edenfield, Adam Pacton, Alison Sperling, Katherine Morrissey, Rachael Sullivan
CONGRATULATIONS ALL!
Above: Paige Conley accepts the Tinsley Helton Dissertation Fellowship
Above: Adam Pacton accepts a Sappenfield Fellowship
Above: James A. Sappenfield Fellowship winners from left to right, Katie Morrissey (Media, Cinema, Digital Studies), Ali Sperling (Literary Studies), Anne Sappenfield (daughter of James Sappenfield), Adam Pacton (Rhetoric and Composition), Rachael Sullivan (Media, Cinema, Digital Studies), Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine (Creative Writing). Not pictured: Avery Edenfield
Congratulations to Senior English major David Menees for his Honorable Mention in the statewide UW System Liberal Arts Essay competition. Way to go David! http://www.wisconsin.edu/news/2012/r120510.htm
TweetPlease join us as we honor this year’s department award winners in a variety of categories: 215p in CRT 368.
Thanks to everyone for all their hard work this year!
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