events – English Department News

September 18, 2016

Join us at the 2016 Rochester Fringe Festival

Come to the Fringe Festival in Rochester, New York next weekend and see what the English department’s creative writers, filmmakers, and multimedia artists have prepared for your enjoyment! All events are free.

See page 35 of the print Festival Guide for a full listing, including free performances from 11:30 am to midnight on Saturday, September 24. Events include:

Guerrilla Art: (a student art collective) have prepared a site-specific installation. At the Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs Sts, Friday 9/23, 5-11 pm, and Saturday 9/24, 12 noon to 11 pm. Faculty sponsor: Lytton Smith.
Heirlooms: creative writers reading their work: Sarah Steil, creative non-fiction Oliver Diaz, fiction Evan Goldstein, poetry 3:45 at the Lyric Theatre, 440 Main St at the corner with Prince. Faculty sponsor: Kristen Gentry.
Filmmakers: Saturday 9/17, 7:15 pm at Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs Interaction by Wei Ying Ch’ng Run by Michael MacDonald Saturday 9/24, 7:15 pm at Spiegelgarden, corner of Main and Gibbs She Used to Be Mine by Anna Tailleur Overture by Jason Guisao Arrive early and turn in an ID for headphones. Faculty sponsor: Melanie Blood.

Concessions are available at both the Spiegelgarden and Lyric Theatre. Free parking at Lyric, garage and pay lots near Spiegelgarden.

April 18, 2014

Cori Winrock Book Launch

Come celebrate National Poetry Month with a book launch for Visiting Assistant Professor of English Cori A. Winrock’s new poetry collection, This Coalition of Bones, just out from Kore Press.

When: Saturday, April 19th
Where: The Yards (50-52 Public Market, Rochester, NY)
Doors Open: 6:30 pm
Festivities begin: 7:00 pm

Admission is free! Donations are always welcome!

This will be a special event featuring readings by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Geneseo alum Daniel T. O’Brien.

Bring a friend! Bring three! It’s a mentor/poem-maker party! There will broadsides by the lovely Anne Royston, poem-lined tote bags, string lights and general merriment! Throw some confetti and ring in the book year!

From the website of Kore Press:

In This Coalition of Bones, the mortal lessons of the body, the unreliability of the mind, the hyperbole of suburbia, and strange intersections of reality are embroidered into a cerebral, yet evocative landscape. Cori A. Winrock’s poems move through an unforgiving, terminal world infused with science, sleight of hand, and the shock of the gross clinic. It is an unsentimental world defined by a playful, eccentric storehouse of created verbs—a place where a glowworm slinkies, girls tween, punks are bonering, people relationship their way into the car, hive their way home.

Prof. Winrock’s work has appeared in Best New Poets 2013, Anti-, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, From the Fishouse, The Journal, and elsewhere. Winrock won the 2012 SLS St. Petersburg Review Award, was chosen as Editor’s Choice for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award, and is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Individual Artist Grant.

April 3, 2014

Bernardine Evaristo to read from her work April 11

Bernardine Evaristo returns to SUNY Geneseo on Friday, April 11 at 4 p.m. (Newton 204) to read from her work as part of the English department’s Literary Forum series. Evaristo is the author of seven books including her new novel, Mr Loverman, about a 74 year-old Caribbean London man who finally comes out of the closet (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 2013 & Akashic Books, US, 2014). Evaristo’s writing, characterized by daring experimentation and subversion, playfully and humorously challenges the myths of various Afro-diasporic histories and identities. Mr Loverman dares to explore almost forbidden topics, such as the seeming prevalence of homophobia in the black community and slavery as its justification.

Since 1997 Evaristo has accepted invitations to take part in over 80 international tours as a writer. She gives readings and delivers talks, keynotes, workshops, and courses. She has held visiting fellowships and professorships. Her books are translated into several languages, including Mandarin. Her awards include the EMMA Best Book Award, Big Red Read, Orange Youth Panel Award, a NESTA Fellowship Award and an Arts Council Writer’s Award. She has won “Book of the Year” 13 times in British newspapers and magazines; The Emperor’s Babe was a Times “Book of the Decade.” Hello Mum has been chosen as one of 20 titles for World Book Night in 2014. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006, and she received an MBE in 2009.

February 23, 2012

Steve Prince to lecture on “The Art of Social Justice” March 1

Artist, educator, and New Orleans native Steve Prince (M.F.A. Michigan State University) will share his art and discuss issues confronting New Orleans and our nation in the continuing recovery from scars left by Hurricane Katrina. Situating his talk within New Orleans’ unique funerary traditions of the Dirge and the Second Line, Prince will discuss ways to find healing and restoration within African American cultural practices. Participants will embark on an American historical journey using the visual arts to grapple with deep moral and ethical dilemmas circulating around race, sex, power, and spirituality.

Represented by Eyekons Gallery (Grand Rapids, Michigan) and Stone Metal Press (San Antonio, Texas), Prince has shown his art internationally in various solo, group, and juried exhibitions, including the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia; the National Gallery of the Bahamas; the Museum of Cultural Arts Center in Santa Catarina, Brazil; the Grand Rapids Museum of Art; the Portsmouth Courthouse Museum; Hampton University Museum; the Museum of African American Culture in New Orleans; Xavier University of Louisiana Gallery; Charles H. Taylor Art Center in Hampton; and the Peninsula Fine Arts Center.

Prince’s lecture is sponsored generously by The Office of the President, Department of English, Africana/Black Studies Program, Office of Multicultural Affairs, Department of History, GOLD Leadership Education, Office of Residence Life, Director of Galleries, and Campus Auxiliary Services

February 17, 2012

Author Jeffrey Cramer to speak on Thoreau

Jeffrey S. Cramer, Curator of Collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, Concord, Massachusetts, will deliver a lecture titled “Living Deliberately: Thinking Like Thoreau Today,” in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Hunt Room, February 23, at 4 p.m. Refreshments will be served following the talk, which is free and open to the public.

Jeff Cramer is the editor of Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition (Yale University Press, 2004) and The Quotable Thoreau (Princeton University Press, 2011). The latter won the Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in Humanities in 2011. His other works include I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (Yale University Press, 2007) and The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition (Yale University Press, 2009). He has two forthcoming books: The Portable Thoreau (Viking Penguin, 2012) and The Literary Way: Selected Essays of Henry D. Thoreau: A Fully Annotated Edition (Yale University Press, 2013). More information about Jeff is available on his website.

The Thoreau Institute and the Thoreau Society are partners with the SUNY Geneseo English department and Milne Library in Digital Thoreau, a project to publish an annotated digital text of Walden that represents the progress of Thoreau’s manuscript through its seven draft versions, and that incorporates materials from the Walter Harding Collection and other collections curated by the institute.