Events

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

This craft talk will explore techniques that maximize the visual impact of our prose and increase our awareness of the “sightlessness” of the reader. One of the fundamental things about the relationship between author and reader is that both must bring something to the experience in order to make for an effective story. On the one side, a reader must make an effort in order to be able to “see” what is being portrayed on the page, and on the other, the writer must work to “show.” And yet, how is this actually accomplished? If it’s not possible for an author to capture, for instance, every single detail of the living room-the way a camera would-or of a character’s face, or of a skyline, then what details must be included? Or perhaps more importantly, what details must be left out? Toward this end, we’ll examine the “black marks” on the page as well as the space in which utter silence, colorlessness and absence of detail exist. We’ll look at a range of artistic expression, including drawings, songs, and pictures.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author, most recently, of the story collection, American Estrangement. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, was selected as one of the 10 best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, and his story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and he leads the Creative Nonfiction track in Hunter's MFA program. He also teaches creative writing at Columbia University and New York University, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award. Purchase Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s work here. 

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of four books, including the 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, an international bestseller, finalist for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and translated into 20 languages. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named one of the Guardian's 100 best books of the 21st century. She also has two poetry collections, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012). Lockwood's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia. Purchase Patricia Lockwood’s work here. 

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of four books, including the 2021 novel "No One Is Talking About This," an international bestseller, finalist for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and translated into 20 languages. Her 2017 memoir "Priestdaddy" won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named one of the Guardian's 100 best books of the 21st century. She also has two poetry collections, "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals" (2014) and "Balloon Pop Outlaw Black" (2012). Lockwood's work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.

This in-person Zoom viewing gathering is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.

There are so many good poems. There are, however, very few perfect poems. While we understand perfection is subjective and unachievable, why is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song” a favorite, a perfect poem among poets? This craft talk examines “Song,” its leaps, sounds, images, digressions, syntax and embellishments, eight years in the making. Understanding the forces behind this beloved poem can give us strategies for writing our very own perfect poem.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, the 2021 Granum Foundation Prize, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial and Poetry International Prizes, as well as fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, MacDowell, the National Endowment and New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018 and 2021. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

We often hear that Covid-19 has served as a perverse diagnostic, lighting up all the fault-lines in our society-especially fault-lines of gender and color, nation and class. We don’t hear enough, however, about the social system that generates those fault lines, even though it’s the same system that brought us the virus in the first place and is blocking our efforts to deal with it. In this lecture, Professor Nancy Fraser shifts the focus to that systemic level. What the pandemic actually diagnoses, Professor Fraser claims, is the deep-seated dysfunctionality of capitalism. Professor Fraser explains this thesis first, by proposing a new account of what capitalism is, and second, by applying that account to the present crisis. The result is to portray the Covid pandemic as a perfect storm that discloses all our system’s multiple, intertwined contradictions--ecological, political, social, and economic. 

This talk is sponsored by The Donald C. Samuel Fund for Economics and Politics. 

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This talk recalls the animals who appeared in my books, or nearby, as I was writing them. An index of these animals, encountered or tracked in jungles, oceans, on streets and hillsides, or at home, might include: Lion, wolf, bear, chimp, shark, monkey, panther, eagle, dog, badger, cobra and owl. At the limit of this index is an humanimal presence, an entity that might be described as monstrous in the context of this curation. Can I tell you thirteen tiny stories in the time that it takes to give this talk? Some of the stories are ancestral. Some of the stories are horror stories. Some of the stories helped me to think about the politics of sanctuary. Some of the stories can't be shared with others. Some of the stories spiked my blood with so much adrenalin, I did not need to write my books in a café at midnight.

Bhanu Kapil is a poet and Fellow of Churchill College. She is the author of six books, most recently How To Wash A Heart (Pavilion Poetry), which won the TS Eliot Prize.  Bhanu is also the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, and a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University. Forthcoming work includes a revised edition of Incubation: a space for monsters (Kelsey Street Press).

This event is sponsored by The Laura Kirchman Manuelidis '63 Science and Literary Arts Endowment Fund.

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