Out & About

I'll be reading at American University tonight with Barbara Goldberg--a kind of homecoming, since I got my MFA there in 2004. Should be a LOT of fun. But if you can't make it, I heartily endorse both of these events coming up in the next week...

Friday, October 3 - TWO events at Catholic University

1:45 PM in McMahon Hall Room 201

A lecture with Stephen Cushman on “Making Lines, Making Poems, Making Books: A Talk on Poetic Forms, Small and Large”

and 3:10 PM in in Hannan Hall Room 108

Stephen Cushman reads from Heart Island

Stephen Cushman is the author of Heart Island, Riffraff, Cussing Lesson, Blue Pajamas, as well as books on William Carlos Williams, form, and the Civil War. He is General Editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th Ed., forthcoming, and Robert C. Taylor Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia.


Reception and book signing to follow; free and open to the public.

Presented by The Department of English and the Graduate Student Association at the Catholic University of America. CUA is accessible from the Red Line Metro, Brookland/CUA Station.

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Not to mention next TUESDAY...

HER OWN SOCIETY: Brenda Wineapple on Emily Dickinson

Tuesday, October 7, 2008 - 7 p.m.

The Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I Street NW
Free and open to the public, book signing and reception to follow.

The Arts Club of Washington will host renowned author Brenda Wineapple as she discusses the lives of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Their mysterious kinship is illuminated in Wineapple’s book White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which Knopf released this August to rave reviews. Higginson was a radical abolitionist, John Brown supporter, gun-runner, and leader of the first federally authorized regiment of black troops. He made the elusive poet’s acquaintance when she responded his Atlantic Monthly article offering advice to “young contributors.” She hand-scribbled a query: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Examining the poems, Higginson recognized “a wholly new and original poetic genius.”

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886) lived out most of her life in her family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. A prolific but private poet, she published fewer than a dozen poems before her death; later generations placed her among the masters of American poetry. Dickinson cultivated few outside correspondences, but her letters with Higginson spanned a quarter-century and included the exchange of almost one hundred poems. They would meet face-to-face only twice, encounters that are carefully and thrillingly recreated in White Heat.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE is also the author of the award-winning Hawthorne: A Life, Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. She teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School and lives in New York City. Judith Thurman of The New Yorker praises Wineapple as “an astute literary biographer with a feisty prose style and a relish for unsettling received ideas....White Heat is written with a dry heat that does justice to its impassioned protagonists.” Franz Wright declared White Heat to be “one of the most astonishing books about poetry I have ever read.”

THE ARTS CLUB OF WASHINGTON is at 2017 I Street NW, near Foggy Bottom/GWU and Farragut West metro. Headquartered in the James Monroe House, a National Historic Landmark, the Club was founded in 1916 and is the oldest non-profit arts organization in the city. The Club’s mission is to generate public appreciation for and participation in the arts through ongoing educational programs that include literary events, art exhibitions, musical and theatrical performances.

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