**UPDATE**
Now joining the conversation on Wednesday evening will be Scott Alarik. He will offer his thoughts on the film, and some contexts for the story it tells.
As the first step in our gradual relocation to our new site, the news blog has been moved. All future updates will be posted to www.alscw.org/news. See you there.
The application deadline for the Second Annual ALSCW/VSC Fellowship is in less than three weeks! For more information about the Vermont Studio Center, please visit www.vermontstudiocenter.org/. If you are interested in applying for the, fellowship, go to www.vermontstudiocenter.org/fellowships. to download an application.
The ALSCW/VSC Fellowship provides a one-month VSC residency for a writer who is a current member of the ALSCW. It is open to all of the Association’s creative writers and literary translators. To be eligible for the fellowship, please make sure you have paid your 2011 dues. If you still need to renew, please do so online at https://www.bu.edu/literary/membership/join-or-renew.shtml.
You are cordially invited to a local meeting of the ALSCW – the first of the spring 2011 semester. Our meeting will be held at the Editorial Institute at Boston University, 143 Bay State Road, in the conference room / library on the first floor. The Editorial Institute is a five-minute walk from Kenmore Square or a two-minute walk from the Blandford St. stop on the Green Line B. Following the lecture, there will be wine and discussion.
Wednesday 23 February, 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Guest speakers Dan Moran and Edmund Jorgensen will be reading excerpts of their own works.
The latest issue of Literary Matters reflects on the ALSCW’s accomplishments at the end of 2010, and anticipates the new year with a new president and new staff. The issue includes updates on recent member activity and accolades, as well as poems by Robert Gibb and Brent Joseph Wells, bios of the ALSCW interns, and the winning essays from our first annual secondary school essay contest. There is a write up of the latest local meeting in Baton Rouge, where members celebrated the prevention of catastrophic funding cuts to the comparative literature program at LSU, thanks in part to the efforts of the ALSCW. In the Neglected Authors column, Rosanna Warren champions the work of Byron Herbert Reece, a poet and novelist she calls “a casualty of modernism.” Adelaide Russo remembers Brent Joseph Wells, and in the Portrait of a Donor column, President Greg Delanty presents a bio of novelist, translator, and donor Francis O’Neill.
Dear ALSCW,
re: the crisis, coming or already here, for foreign language departments in US Academe
As you know, ALSCW has been supporting departments of comparative literature facing termination, and has prevailed, in collaboration with the MLA and other associations, in reversing an execution at LSU Baton Rouge, and has brought about a stay of execution and a chance for rethinking the question at University of Toronto.
An excerpt from Virgil’s Aeneid translated by David Ferry is featured as a new ALSCW broadside — the second in a series of broadsides designed by Zachary Sifuentes for the ALSCW. (See the news article about our third broadside – a poem by Jane Hirshfield – here.)
Ferry, a lifetime member of the ALSCW, is an award-winning translator and poet currently teaching at Boston University. The new broadside contains his translation of the Golden Bough passage from The Aeneid. The image is purple and gray, with an elegant and airy quality appropriate for the subject matter. You can read more about designer Zachary Sifuentes and see his other two ALSCW broadsides on our Broadside Gallery webpage.
Jane Hirshfield’s previously unpublished poem “For the LOBARIA, USNEA, Witches’ Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen” is featured on a new broadside — the third in a series of broadsides designed by Zachary Sifuentes for the ALSCW.
After graduating from Princeton University and studying at the San Francisco Zen Center, Hirshfield began her career as a writer, teacher, and translator. Her work has been described as including elements of both western and eastern poetry, while using simple language that is subtly inviting to complexity.
On Friday, November 5th at the ALSCW conference in Princeton, NJ, Patricia Hampl, Mark Edmunson, Mark Halliday and Phillip Lopate sat on a panel to discuss “The Common Reader” and the common, contemporary experience of reading.
Hampl focused on the relationship between the author’s mind and the reader’s mind, specifically in personal forms of writing. She cited Fitzgerald’s collection of essays, “The Crack-Up,” as a series of psychological breakdowns between story and poem that marked a shift from omniscience to an autobiographical and personal voice.