MAENGL

Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice invites you to attend

David Gewanter

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2010

SEMINAR | 5:30 PM | NEW NORTH 408

READING | 8:00 PM | COPLEY FORMAL LOUNGE

Reception and book-signing to follow

from “War Bird: A Journal”

The massed and pillared wings of

the White House never fly—

whitewashed yearly, they stand

impervious

to metaphor,

to hawk and dove, and red armies

of ants. Only the halting squirrels

investigate, creeping past the arrowhead

gates to scratch

the Midas lawns

for treasure—On the street, commentators

wander like boys in a story too simple

to explain.

Our 2010-2011 Poetry at Noon series continues with a November program entitled “Insider/Outsider Experiences.” David Gewanter, Carol V. Davis and Joseph Ross will use poetry to convey what it feels like to be an insider or an outsider. The event takes place on Tuesday, November 16 at 12:00 noon in the Whittall Pavilion in the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. SE in Washington, DC. The event is free and tickets are not required. Please join us!

Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice invites you to attend

Michael Ondaatje

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2010

SEMINAR | 5:30 PM | NEW NORTH 408

READING | 8:00 PM | PRESIDENT’S ROOM, HEALY HALL

Reception and book-signing to follow in Riggs Library

(adjacent to the President’s Room)

from “Handwriting”
The Distance of a Shout

We lived on the medieval coast
south of warrior kingdoms
during the ancient age of the winds
as they drove all things before them.

Monks from the north came
down our streams floating—that was
the year no one ate fish.

There was no book of the forest,
no book of the sea, but these
are the places people died.

Handwriting occurred on waves,
on leaves, the scripts of smoke,
a sign on a bridge along the Mahaweli River.

A gradual acceptance of this new language.

This event is free and open to the public.

WALKING ON AIR: ALICE McDERMOTT
AND THE FAITH OF THE NOVELIST

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

LECTURE
4:30 p.m. – Riggs Library, Third Floor, Healy Hall

RECEPTION
6:00 p.m. – The President’s Room, Third Floor, Healy Hall

Georgetown University
37th and “O” Streets, NW
Washington, D.C.

R.s.v.p. by October 31 to
Msg52@georgetown.edu

Alice McDermott is a New York Times best-selling author who was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of several acclaimed novels: That Night (1987) was a finalist for the Pultizer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pen/Faulkner Award; At Weddings and Wakes (1992) was a New York Times best-seller and Pulitzer finalist; Charming Billy (1998) won the National Book Award; Child of My Heart (2002) was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and After This (2006) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is currently a writer-in-residence at John Hopkins University.

Paul Elie is a Senior Editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, New York, and the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003), a group portrait of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, the Beliefnet Book of the Year award, and the annual awards in Christianity and Literature and in the Literature of the South given by the Modern Language Association; the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.

Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, is having a book discussion at the Goethe Institute on Wednesday, March 3 at 6:30.  The event will be moderated by Georgetown’s own Peter Pfeiffer.  Here’s a snippet from the flyer distributed to mark the event:

Mueller’s novel Passport will be the topic of this session of the European Literature Book Club, which is designed to provide an opportunity to discuss European literature in a friendly literary atmosphere. Books can be purchased at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Avenue NW). Please bring your book to the discussion. A series of themes and questions will be distributed at the beginning of the event or sent in advance by email.

The Goethe Institute is located in Chinatown (812 7th St. NW).  There’s a $5 charge for those who are not Goethe Institute members.

Georgetown is very fortunate to present Nigerian writer EC Osondu, the 2009 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story, “Waiting.” More information on Osundu and “Waiting” can be found here.

Osundo will read from his work (and he is known to be a great reader, by the way!) this Thursday, February 18th, at 8:00pm in Copley Formal Lounge. As always, a reception will follow.

Osondu has also won the Allen and Nirelle Galso Prize for Fiction, and another story of his, “Jimmy Carter’s Eyes,” was short-listed for the Caine Prize in 2007.

Hello everyone,

Cheryl and I are proud to present the MAENGL podcast that we worked on last semester! We interviewed former English M.A. student, Anna Kruse, the inventor of MAENGL, and two students working on research blogs within the MAENGL community, Laura Chasen and Michael Walsh. Our podcast presents an in-depth look at both the MAENGL model and at academic blogging here at Georgetown, so take a listen! You can access the podcast here.

The Lannan Program is proud to present a reading by Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur “Genius” Grant winning poet, John Ashbery. The reading will take place on Tuesday, February 2nd, at 8:00pm in Copley Formal Lounge. Recently, Ashbery’s “Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems” won the 2008 Griffin International Prize for Poetry. “Planisphere,” his latest volume of new poetry, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in December 2009.

Find out more about John Ashbery at  www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=233.