UAB Writers' Series: Annual Mersmann Poetry Awards
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
6:30 p.m., UAB Spencer Honors House
The Mersmann Awards (named in honor of retired faculty member and poet Jim Mersmann) are given annually for the best reading or rendition by a student of a poem written by another author and a best original poem. Traditionally, this event has been an opportunity for students to read aloud from their favorite works and to give voice to words they may often read though seldom hear.
The Mersmann competition, combined with the open-mic portion of the program—which is also intended to showcase the original work of students—offers us a chance to celebrate the true music of the written word. So please come and read a favorite piece of poetry or, better yet, recite one of your own. (Each person will be limited to reading one poem in each part of the program.)
There will be plenty of pizza to go around.
We hope to see you there.
For more info join the UAB Writers’ Series group on Facebook.
UAB Writers' Series: Salgado Maranhão
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
7:00 p.m., Hulsey Recital Hall
Salgado Maranhão is one of Brazil’s leading contemporary poets. His collected poems, The Color of the Word, won Brazil’s highest award, the Premio de Poesia da Academia Brasileira de Letras, for the year 2011. An earlier collection, Mural of Winds, won the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1999. In addition to eight books of poetry, including The Snake’s Fists, The Kiss of the Beast, and the recentTiger’s Fur, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians. My translations of poems by this stylistically provocative poet have so far appeared inBOMB, Bitter Oleander, Brasil/Brazil, Connotation Press (on-line), Controlled Burn, Cream City Review, Dirty Goat, Faultline, Fourth River, Left Curve, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Metamorphoses, Natural Bridge, Osiris, Per Contra, Pleiades, Rosebud, Sirena, Spoon River Poetry Review, Subtropics, Turnrow (on-line),Words Without Borders, and Xavier Review.
Alexis Levitin is one of the most respected English-language translators of Portuguese and Brazilian literature, as well as literature from Ecuador. In addition to 20 books of translations, including eleven collections of poems by Portugal’s foremost living poet, Eugenio de Andrade, Alexis has published translations in approximately 25 anthologies and 200 literary journals such as Grand Street, Partisan Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. His numerous prizes, awards, and grants include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Columbia University Translation Center, and, in Portugal, the Camões Institute, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Book Institute. He has also received a prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency.
Maranhão's poetry collection, Blood of the Sun, will be available for purchase at the reading.
UAB BookTalk: Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
6 p.m., Henley Room, Mervyn Sterne Library
Prof. Ana Maria Santiago will lead a discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
UAB Writers' Series: Mark Neely
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
7:00 p.m., Hulsey Recital Hall
Mark Neely’s first book, Beasts of the Hill, won the FIELD Poetry Prize and was published by Oberlin College Press in early 2012. He is also the author of a chapbook, Four of a Kind, winner of the Concrete Wolf chapbook contest. His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Indiana Review, Salt Hill, FIELD, North American Review, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere. He received his BA from The University of Illinois, and his MFA from The University of Alabama, where he was poetry editor of the Black Warrior Review. He is an Associate Professor of English at Ball State University, and the editor of The Broken Plate. He lives in Muncie, Indiana, with his wife—writer Jill Christman—and their two children.
Visit: markneely.com • Read: "tonight I am kicking down the doors" • Listen: "The Middle of the Night"
UAB BookTalk: Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
6 p.m., Henley Room, Mervyn Sterne Library
Prof. Randa Graves will lead a discussion of Téa Obreht's novel The Tiger's Wife.
Alumni Lecture: Paul Devlin
Alumni Lecture Series
Dr. Paul Devlin will present "Jammin' with Jazz Autobiography: Riffs on the Dilemma and Genius of the Form Across History, Genre, and Theory."
7 p.m., September 26, 2012, in the Hulsey Recital Hall
Paul Devlin is the editor of Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones, as told to Albert Murray (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Legendary jazz drummer Papa Jo Jones (who was raised in Birmingham) intended to write his autobiography with the help of the acclaimed novelist, essayist, and jazz historian Albert Murray (a native of Mobile). Between 1977-1985, Murray and Jones recorded interviews that Paul, beginning in 2005, transcribed, edited, annotated, and contextualized with an introduction. Rifftide was a finalist for the Jazz Journalists Association Award for Best Jazz Book of 2011. His freelance writing has appeared in Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The Daily Beast, The Root, The Antioch Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. Since 2008 he has been a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He currently teaches at St. John's University in Queens. He is also the author of the Amazon-Kindle e-book Reading Hemingway Through Wittgenstein / Reading Wittgenstein Through Hemingway. Paul has contributed to African American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation (University of Alabama Press, 2010), which is the first book of essays on Albert Murray.
UAB BookTalk: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
6 p.m., Henley Room, Mervyn Sterne Library
Prof. Rusty Rushton will lead a discussion of Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash.
UAB Writers' Series: David Bottoms
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
7:00 p.m., Hulsey Recital Hall
David Bottoms’s first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in five dozen anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. Among his awards are the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Bottoms lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. A book of essays on his work, David Bottoms: Critical Essays and Interviews, edited by William Walsh, was published in 2010. His most recent collection, We Almost Disappear, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2011. He is poet laureate of Georgia.
Read "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump" on Poets.org