Events

Fiction can encourage empathy without condoning violence. In this lecture, Marc Anthony Richardson will discuss humanizing "monsters" for strong creative writing and an honest understanding of ourselves, as well as read an excerpt from his forthcoming novel poem, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast. According to the Jungian concept of the shadow, "bad" qualities are often suppressed, and as Alan Watts stated, "To the degree that you condemn others, and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself." What are we pretending not to know? Labeling occurs out of confusion. But could the Sanskrit saying "tat tvam asi," or, that thou art, be true? In essence, could everyone be us? "The devil is the belief in duality," to quote Ernest Holmes, and, if this is the case, the monsters from Milton's Paradise Lost to Shelley's Frankenstein to the Gospel of Judas will continue to have something indispensable to teach us.

Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia. Year of the Rat, his autobiographical novel, won an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Messiahs, a speculative novel, was a fiction finalist for the Big Other Book Award. The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, a novelistic poem, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Richardson also received an award from Creative Capital, grants from PEN America and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, a Hurston/Wright Foundation fellowship, and residencies from Art Omi and the Vermont Studio Center. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, and many others. He received his BFA from Antioch College and his MFA from Mills College at Northeastern University, and he has taught at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania. He was recently a 2022 Andrew W. Mellon Scholar-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and a 2024 Artistic Practitioner Fellow at Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.

This event is colloquium credit eligible.

Please join us for conversation and coffee with Faculty member and Mellon Public Humanities Assistant Professor, Emily Bloom, on her new book, I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art. Emily’s deeply personal memoir takes us on a journey into the depths and demands of parenting in the modern age. We are honored to recognize and celebrate this wonderful and important new work.

In recognition of faculty scholarship and creativity, Faculty Spotlight is an event series that celebrates the creation of significant new work by faculty in all mediums. Recorded as a podcast before a live audience in the Library and moderated by podcaster Tim Kail, each Spotlight brings our community together around a shared appreciation of our faculty. Episodes are published on the library website and preserved in the College Archives as a permanent record of faculty voice and scholarship. This event is generously co-sponsored by the Office of the President.

This virtual session is intended for those wishing to explore the field of dance/movement therapy as a possible career pathway. We look forward to exploring the fundamentals of our field, and why Sarah Lawrence's dance/movement therapy program might be right for you. REGISTER HERE. 

In this reading and talk, Jee Leong Koh MFA ’05 will read from and discuss poems from his book Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America (Gaudy Boy, 2023). Called “a new Canterbury Tales for our time”, Sample and Loop tells the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America, rendering the surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse. This reading and talk will discuss documentary poetics, the process of interviewing for a book-length project, and the author’s work in founding the transnational literary organization Singapore Unbound and Gaudy Boy press, and in organizing the upcoming Singapore Literature Festival in NYC.

Jee Leong Koh MFA ’05 is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. His hybrid work of fiction, Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet won the Singapore Literature Prize. His latest book Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America is shortlisted for this year's Singapore Literature Prize in creative nonfiction. Jee founded and heads the NYC-based transnational literary organization, Singapore Unbound, which publishes literary works through the Gaudy Boy press and the SUSPECT journal and organizes events such as the Singapore Literature Festival and the Second Saturdays Reading Series.

This event is colloquium credit eligible and will be held both in person and over Zoom. Register for the Zoom livestream HERE.