We are delighted to invite you to the first installment of the ALSCW’s fall Zoom series. We are deeply grateful to our participants and to all of you for your support of the ALSCW (information on memberships and renewals can be found at ALSCW.org). The panelists will take questions from the audience during the last twenty minutes of our session. Please join our Zoom seminar through this link: Zoom Seminar Link (Click Here)
September 9th, 6 pm to 7:15 pm EST: “American Classics, American Crisis”
We are delighted to announce the ALSCW’s fall Zoom series. As many of you know, the 25th annual conference of the ALSCW, which was scheduled at Yale University in October, was canceled because of the pandemic. Our Zoom series in the fall of 2020 and in the spring of 2021 will help to keep our membership connected and to advance our organization’s mission to advance the study and creation of literature. We are deeply grateful to our participants—it’s an incredibly talented lineup—and to all of you for your support of the ALSCW (information on memberships and renewals can be found at ALSCW.org). We will send out a link a week to ten days before each event.
Mark Edmundson Is University Professor at the University of Virginia and the author of a dozen books, including Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals and The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing Teaching. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Literary Imagination, Raritan, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The American Scholar, The American Scholar, Yale Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other venues. The National Endowment of the Humanities has honored him as a Distinguished Teaching Professor.
ALSCW Symposium on Populism and the Arts
August 16-18
Washington, DC
Catholic University
This symposium builds on one held in 2018 at the University of Goettingen on populism and poetry. It looks into questions about “the people” (das Volk) and about populist modes of politics (broadly construed) as they relate to poetry, fiction, drama, music, and other art forms. It follows two lines of inquiry.
The first concerns artists who have seen themselves as the voice of the people or of a people, as tribunes of some popular sentiment, feeling, grievance or aspiration, either as such or in relation to an alleged elite with which they are at odds. Such figures have appeared on both the political Left and the political Right.
The ALSCW works to foster and recognize excellence in the critically important area of student writing of analytical essays at the secondary school level. We invite submissions of analytical essays by students in grades 9 through 12 dealing with works of recognized literary merit. Papers may examine style, characterization, rhetorical technique, and structure, and may be about individual poems, short stories, novels, plays, or essays. Papers may also compare two carefully selected works.
At Home In the World: Women Writers and Public Life
Maria DiBattista and Deborah Nord
5 pm, December 6th, 2017
McGiveny Hall
(co-sponsored by Politics and Prose bookstore)
Deborah Nord, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature
The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
invites you to a reading and conversation with
J. Chester Johnson
Poet, Essayist, Translator
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
7:00 pm
The Culture Center
410 Columbus Avenue
(Between West 79th & West 80th Streets)
New York, NY 10024
Doors open at 6:30 pm | Talk begins at 7:00 pm
~ Refreshments before the reading & after ~
Focusing on his two books published in 2017, Chester Johnson will read selections from Now and Then, his new poetry collection, and discuss Auden, the Psalms, and Me, the story of his experience working with W. H. Auden on a retranslation of the Psalms.
Helen Pinkerton & Herman Melville: Civil War Poems
Dr John Baxter
Professor Emeritus of English, Dalhousie University
Helen Pinkerton, known for her devotional poems and poems on works of art, is also an astute commentator on crucial aspects of the American Civil War and especially on maintaining perspective in the heat of intense political debate. In her recently published collected poems, A Journey of the Mind, she examines some of these topics through the eyes of Herman Melville, one of America’s greatest writers and himself a major Civil War poet, testifying first-hand to the causes and consequences of the conflict.
Poet and musician T.R. Hummer spoke on the making of High Minded (2010)–an album by his band, AmeriCamera, that fuses poetry and music–at an ALSCW local meeting in Washington DC on February 8th. Hummer’s multi-media presentation was attended by an audience of over one-hundred, and hosted by Catholic University. Hummer is the author of fourteen books of poetry, two books of criticism, and is the former editor of the Kenyon Review and the Georgia Review. An accomplished saxophonist, Hummer was a member of the blues group Little Ronnie and the Grand Dukes, playing on their album, Young and Evil, which was released by Planetary Records in 2001.
