Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series
Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series Reading
Poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist Anne Waldman will open the spring 2018 Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University.
Waldman co-founded, along with Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974. The school was the first Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere.
Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series
Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series Reading
She is the author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics and an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as “Marriage: A Sentence”; “Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble”; “Manatee/Humanity,” which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species; and “Gossamurmur,” a meditation on the archive of poetry — all published by Penguin Poets.
Her anti-war feminist epic, “The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment,” which was a 25-year project, won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is “Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born,” which, as described by poet Lyn Hejinian, “brings Waldman’s work into the more intimate paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge”; and “Fantastic Caryatids” (Blaze Vox, 2017), which Waldman co-authored with poet, translator, critic, editor and curator Vincent Katz. Her complete bibliography is available here.
Waldman, whose work has been translated into numerous languages, has read in the streets as well as in numerous larger venues, such as the Dodge Literary Festival in the U.S. and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India in 2017, where she was the keynote speaker. She continues to teach poetics all over the world and has presented her work in Jaipur, Bratislava, Wuhan, Beijing, Berlin, Nicaragua, Prague, Kerala, Mumbai, Calcutta, Marrakech and Madrid, among other locations. In 2017, she curated the Voz Alta poetry performance festival at Casa del Lago in Mexico City.
Waldman served six years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and the Huffington Post named her one of the top advocates for American poetry. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for lifetime achievement; the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award; and a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship. Additionally, she has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, and has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice.
She is distinguished professor of poetics at Naropa University, where she is artistic director of the university’s Summer Writing Program and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary and oral archive. Her new collection, “Trickster Feminism,” is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in July 2018.
North Carolina Poet Laureate Emeritus Joseph Bathanti, professor of creative writing in Appalachian’s Department of English, is the faculty host for Waldman’s visit.
In his reflections on the poet, Bathanti said, “In 1974, maybe 1975, I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, and I attended a reading by Anne Waldman. The reading and Anne simply knocked me out. I was thoroughly unprepared for her presence and delivery. I can still see her swaying and chanting from her now canonical ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ from which she read that evening.
“The work she has done — not even mentioning her dozens of books — to forward social justice and environmental stewardship and peace over the span of her career is astonishing,” he said. “The Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series, in collaboration with Appalachian’s 2018 Black Mountain College Semester, is so very excited to host her this semester.”
Copies of Waldman's books will be available for purchase at the reading and craft talk. The author will also be available for book signing following each event.
For additional information about the spring 2018 series, please visit https://visitingwriters.appstate.edu or contact Susan Weinberg, the series' coordinator, at [email protected]
Poetry by Anne Waldman
2016
By Anne Waldman and Vincent Katz
2016
Poetry by Anne Waldman
2011
Appalachian State University
Spring semester 2018
About the College of Arts and Sciences
The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at Appalachian State University is home to 17 academic departments, two centers and one residential college. These units span the humanities and the social, mathematical and natural sciences. CAS aims to develop a distinctive identity built upon our university's strengths, traditions and locations. The college’s values lie not only in service to the university and local community, but through inspiring, training, educating and sustaining the development of its students as global citizens. More than 6,800 student majors are enrolled in the college. As the college is also largely responsible for implementing App State’s general education curriculum, it is heavily involved in the education of all students at the university, including those pursuing majors in other colleges. Learn more at https://cas.appstate.edu.
About Appalachian State University
As a premier public institution, Appalachian State University prepares students to lead purposeful lives. App State is one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina System, with a national reputation for innovative teaching and opening access to a high-quality, affordable education for all. The university enrolls more than 21,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and 80 graduate majors at its Boone and Hickory campuses and through App State Online. Learn more at https://www.appstate.edu.
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