Please join us for a reading and discussion with Emily Johnston, poet, essayist, and activist.

Thursday, February 1st at 4:15 p.m. in the Hatfield Room.

Johnston’s writing explores the beauty of the natural world, grief at its destruction by human action and inaction, and our obligations to the future. She is the author of the poetry volume Her Animals, as well as essays in Truthout, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She is one of the five Valve Turners who in 2016 shut down tar sands oil pipelines entering the US. Facing felony charges for their actions, she and two co-defendants have been granted the opportunity to argue in court that their actions were necessary.

All are welcome. We hope to see you there.

Frann Michel
Professor of English
Co-chair, Film Studies

Please mark your calendars for an engaging and informative lecture on “pandas” Monday, February 5 at 4:15 p.m. in the Hatfield Room.

Professor E. Elena Songster of St. Mary’s College of California will share her research on the establishment of the panda preserves in western China and the concurrent development of a conservation ethos in the People’s Republic of China in a talk titled, “Protecting Pandas and the Evolution of Environmental Science and Stewardship in the P.R.C.” The lecture is free and open to the public — please encourage your students to attend!

Note: content and photo from campus-wide email.

Update on the Tree of Giving Book Drive

Thank you so much for participating in this year’s Tree of Giving Book Drive.  We have officially wrapped up for this year, and Four Corners Elementary was the beneficiary this year.  Together we collected 181 books (including five Spanish-language books), 28 gloves, 15 hats, and 4 scarfs.  We also want to thank all of our drop off locations: The Willamette Store who also provided a 30% discount on books purchased for the Tree of Giving, the Bistro, Law Library, and Sparks Athletic Center.

Additional info is available at: https://libguides.willamette.edu/tree-of-giving. For questions about this event, please contact John Repplinger (jrepplin@willamette.edu) or Michael Smith (msmith@willamette.edu).

Below are a few photos of the book donations given to Four Corners Elementary School.  Thank you again for all of your wonderful support!

Dear colleagues,

Please join us in the Hatfield Room at 4:30 on Wednesday 11/29 as Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl share their bestselling children’s books, Rad American Women A to Z and Rad Women Worldwide, and discuss “how to be rad in difficult times.” This event is free and open to the public, and it’s family friendly. We’ll have coffee and cookies, and the Willamette store will have books available for purchase. A book signing will follow the discussion.

This event is sponsored by Civic Communication and Media department, with significant support from Willamette’s Mellon-funded Learning By Creating initiative.

During their Willamette visit, Schatz and Klein Stahl will also lead a half-day workshop for students in CCM/AES/WGS 342, my course on U.S. Women’s Activism Since 1920. The workshop will support students’ collaborative project: a collection of visual portraits, biographies, and critical essays designed to enrich public understanding of women’s contributions to American life.  In addition, students will interview Schatz and Klein Stahl for the KMUZ radio show Worldviews Wednesdays, as part of the La Chispa project led by Professor Catalina de Onís.

About the speakers:

Kate Schatz is the New York Times-bestselling author of Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide. She’s a writer, editor, and educator, who’s been passionate about both writing and politics since she was a kid. She’s a co-founder of Solidarity Sundays, a nationwide network of feminist activist groups, and she lives with her family on the island of Alameda.

Miriam Klein Stahl is a Bay Area artist, educator and activist. In addition to her work in printmaking, drawing, sculpture, paper-cut and public art, she is also the co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School where she’s taught since 1995. As an artist, she follows in a tradition of making socially relevant work, creating portraits of political activists, misfits, radicals and radical movements. As an educator, she has dedicated her teaching practice to address equity through the lens of the arts. Her work has been widely exhibited and reproduced internationally. She lives in Berkeley, California with her wife, artist Lena Wolff, daughter Hazel, and their dog Lenny.

A Facebook page for the event is available at: https://www.facebook.com/events/140523173385824/

Please join us for the final event of the Fall 2017 Hallie Ford Literary Series, a reading by Tommy Pico. The reading will take place on Tuesday, November 14th, at 7:00 p.m. in the Hatfield Room (2nd floor of Hatfield Library) and is free and open to the public.

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), and Junk (forthcoming 2018 from Tin House Books). He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been profiled in Fusion, Nylon, and the New Yorker. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker at the Ace Hotel, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. @heyteebs

To give you a sense of his work, you’ll find a brief but descriptive review of Pico’s second collection, Nature Poem, from Publishers Weekly below:

“Pico (IRL) centers his second book-length poem on the trap of conforming to identity stereotypes as he ponders his reluctance to write about nature as a Native American. This is “fodder for the noble savage/ narrative,” he writes as ignorant people ask, “do I feel more connected to nature/ bc I’m NDN.” Other similarly problematic expectations are wryly discussed: “An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like// I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston/ I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry.” As an extension of this dilemma, Pico poses questions about what is natural human behavior: Is it natural for a football player to assault his girlfriend? Is colonialism natural? What about the feeling one gets while listening to Beyoncé’s “Mine”? Pico’s alter-ego “Teebs” remains in constant motion, leaping from the dentist’s office to drag queen karaoke night to the movie theater: “I’m an adult I only let myself have/ candy at the movies/ so I’ve been going to the movies A LOT.” In making the subliminal overt, Pico reclaims power by calling out microaggressions and drawing attention to himself in the face of oppression, “the way the only thing more obvious than your body/ is leaving yr shirt on in the pool.” (May)”

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-941040-63-8

If you have any questions about the event, please contact Danielle Deulen at dcdeulen@willamette.edu.

Please join us for the second event of the Fall 2017 Hallie Ford Literary Series, a reading by Mike Scalise.  The reading will take place on Tuesday, October 24th, at 7:00 p.m. in the Hatfield Room (2nd floor of Hatfield Library) and is free and open to the public.

Scalise’s memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe, was the recipient of the Center for Fiction’s 2014 Christopher Doheny Award.  Scalise’s story begins when a ruptured pituitary tumor leaves him with the hormone disorder acromegaly at age 24, and he must navigate a new, alien world of illness maintenance. His mother, who has a chronic heart condition and a flair for drama, serves as a complicated model. Ultimately, it is a moving, funny exploration of how we define ourselves by the stories we choose to tell.

Mike Scalise’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Agni, Indiewire, Ninth Letter, Paris Review Daily, and other places.  He is an 826DC advisory board member, has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and the Ucross Foundation, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University.

PRAISE FOR THE BRAND NEW CATASTROPHE:

“His way is with humor, optimism, courage and probing introspection, the very characteristics—combined with crisp prose and a rare and innately interesting medical condition—that make this a winning literary debut.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An offbeat, witty memoir. . . Scalise is unsparing in recounting his reaction to his diagnosis while keeping the reader engaged in a story about catastrophe. . . Sensitive and well-written.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In his memoir The Brand New Catastrophe, Mike Scalise meditates with crackling wit and self-awareness on chronic illness, family, and the clichés of catastrophe stories.”—Kenyon Review

“The effects of illness on self-image and its gravitational pull on family, friends, and spouse are touchingly detailed in this upbeat health memoir.” —Booklist review

“Despite the seriousness of the subject, The Brand New Catastrophe manages to be as funny as it is smart about mortality, the fragility of our bodies, and understanding the worst things that happen to us.”—Buzzfeed Books

“The Brand New Catastrophe reveals the human experience of acromegaly with a beautiful and skillful clarity, rendering the rare and misunderstood disorder with an intimate, personal grace.” —Literary Hub

Image source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6873239.Mike_Scalise