The essay, “Letter from Fredericksburg,” by Assistant Professor of English Colin Rafferty, is featured in the November/December issue of The Utne Reader. The essay originally appeared in The Bellingham Review.
Claudia Emerson, professor of English and Arrington distinguished chair of poetry, had her poem “Catfish” featured in the October 24th issue of The New Yorker. The poem is below:
Catfish
It nuzzles oblivion, confuses
itself with mud. A creature
of familiar taste, it ambushes
from its nest of ooze the pond’s
brighter fish, clears its palate
with their eggs, lumbers fat
and stagnant into winter, lulled
into dreams of light sinking until
light drowns, and all is as before.
The winner of the Great Lives contest has been determined! The FIRST person to correctly identify the faces on the display in Monroe Hall is… Jeremy Thompson.
The 17 persons featured in the display who have been the subjects of biographies and film are:
1. Kurt Vonnegut (American novelist)
2. Marie Curie (discoverer of radium)
3. Madam CJ Walker (cosmetics entrepreneur)
4. The Wright Brothers (inventors of the airplane)
5. P. T. Barnum (circus showman)
6. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (first President of Turkey)
7. Clarence Darrow (American attorney)
8. Jackie Robinson (first black Major League Baseball player of the modern era)
9. Noah Webster (creator of the first American dictionary)
10. General Marquis de Lafayette (French-born general of the American Revolution)
11. Anne Frank (diarist of her experiences as a Jewish girl in hiding)
12. Mildred Loving and Richard Perry Loving (plaintiffs in landmark case overturning laws forbidding mixed marriages)
13. Aaron Burr (American Revolutionary War general, later Vice President)
14. Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women)
15. Christopher Columbus (explorer of the New World)
All of the above will be the subjects of presentations in the Great Lives Lecture Series beginning in January 2012. As the winner, Jeremy will have his choice of either dinner for two at the Fredericksburg restaurant of his choice; or, dinner for two with the guest speaker/author of his choice in the spring Great Lives Lecture Series.
Congratulations, Jeremy.
– From Charles J. Shields, associate director of the Great Lives Lecture Series
Free Jazz Concert
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| Robert Jospé |
Robert Jospé, renowned jazz drummer, percussionist, composer and educator leads the Inner Rhythm Quartet. The group presents a vibrant repertoire, fusing the buoyant grooves of salsa, samba, swing, funk, and African rhythms into their distinctive sound.
Jospé will be joined by Jeff Decker on saxaphones, Bob Hallahan on piano, and Randall Pharr on bass. This free concert/lecture program explains the history and structure of Jazz, Blues and Standard song forms and performs compositions that illustrate how West African rhythms have influenced American music.
Ben LaBreche, assistant professor in English, has been selected to receive the prestigious James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America.
The award recognizes a distinguished published article on John Milton, the 17th century poet and author of Paradise Lost, and will be shared this year by two recipients. LaBreche won the prize for his essay, “Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism and the Politics of Miltonic Divorce.” The essay, selected from among the more than 100 Miltonic articles published each year, appeared in English Literary History, a quarterly journal of The Johns Hopkins University for scholars and educators in English and American literature, literary history and theory. The Milton Society will present the award to LaBreche at the annual dinner meeting of the society at the Modern Language Association convention in Seattle in January 2012.
