Please join us for the final event of the Spring 2018 Hallie Ford Literary Series, a reading with Jennifer Cognard-Black this Tuesday, April 10th at 5:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room (2nd floor of the Hatfield Library). This event is free and open to the public.
Jennifer Cognard-Black is a Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her specialties are Anglo-American women novelists, fiction writing, and the literatures of food. A Fulbright scholar to Slovenia as well as the Norton T. Dodge Award for Creative and Scholarly Achievement, Cognard-Black’s books include Narrative in the Professional Age (Routledge 2004); Kindred Hands (Iowa UP 2006); a writing textbook, Advancing Rhetoric (Kendall/Hunt 2006); an anthology of food fictions, culinary poems, and recipe recollections, Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (NYUP 2014); and a collection of essays by women writers about their everyday contraptions, From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines (MSUP 2016).
Cognard-Black is a dynamic, accomplished writer of both scholarly and creative work. Of her process, she says, “When I write creatively, I put things together. I synthesize disparate parts of what constitutes the human: a salamander in the bathroom, the bouncy chorus of an overplayed song, loss, love, death, delight, or a broken bone at age three. Like the synthesis of an exquisite, yet simple, dish—that divine combination, say, of April asparagus, crispy fingerling potatoes, rosemary, olive oil, and an over-easy egg—a well-crafted short story or essay should become more than the sum of its parts. Such writing should be absolutely of this world yet also, always, otherworldly: a combination that defies easy explanation and that brings both pleasure and awe.”
Praise for the works of Jennifer Cognard-Black:
“The anthology From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines, features essays examining women’s relationships with a wide range of tools: from tractor to typewriter, sewing machine to microphone, radio to prosthetic leg. The book offers a timely focus, during an era when cell phones, laptops, and fitness trackers can feel like extensions of our very selves. Edited by Joyce Dyer, Jennifer Cognard-Black, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, the anthology focuses on machines in use from the early 20th century through today. It offers historical context for contemporary discussions about how today’s technologies shape our lives—the ways we think, the relationships we have, and the identities we adopt—and it provides insight into how these machines connect with the experiences of women, including daughters and mothers.” — Heather Mcentarfer, Literary Mama
“What is particularly innovative about Books that Cook is the way in which the book calls upon the reader to bring these recipes to life: “When a food is shared and eaten, the reader actually embodies the text . . . the reader’s own body is altered as a result of reading and eating this text. In a very real sense, then, a recipe reader becomes that recipe: she breathes it, her heart beats it, and thus the text is known both by the mind and by the body” (2). However, to “embody the text” does not require chronological linearity. Instead, the reader is encouraged to “sample” the poetics, prose, and recipes based on their unique position and ‘taste.’” –Lila A. Sharif, American Studies
“In Kindred Hands Jennifer Cognard-Black and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls have compiled an extraordinarily useful and lively collection of letters by major British and American literary women from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jessie Redmon Fauset. Energetic, imaginative, analytic, and keenly committed to their art, all these authors muse on the muse—and often with vivid candor on their own experiences of art and life—in writings that will be fascinating not only to the professional scholar but also to what Virginia Woolf called ‘the common reader.’”—Sandra M. Gilbert, coeditor, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
For more on Jennifer Cognard-Black, please visit her author’s site at http://www.jennifercognard-black.com
Questions about the event, please direct to: Danielle Deulen at dcdeulen@willamette.edu.