Monthly Archives: March 2017

Lee Ann Brown – Creative Writing Reading Series

Creative Writing Reading Series

 Wednesday 22 March 2017

6.30pm at Reid Hall, in the University of Kent in the Kent Paris  Seminar Room

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006

All welcome.

Lee Ann Brown

“To paraphrase Lee Ann’s version of her own poetic genealogy: enthusiasm is the mother (‘We are the daughters of enthusiasm’), excitement the sister (‘Where are my excitement sisters’). Sappho, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein are among the many innovative godmothers who grace her work with their influential kisses. As a woman writer myself, I am grateful to Lee Ann for the way she unabashedly connects gender to knowledge. In her poems, knowing is knowing as a woman. Knowledge is pleasure. The life of the mind is refreshingly erotic. What was once deemed too trivial here shines.”

– Elaine Equi

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the author of several works, including Other Archer, which also appears in French translation by Stéphane Bouquet as Autre Archère, In the Laurels, Caught, which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, and Polyverse, which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein. In 1989, she founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She currently divides her time between New York City, where she teaches at St. John’s University, and Marshall, North Carolina.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Rendered into English

Politics of Translation: Translating Cultures

Thursday 30 March 2017

7:00 pm at Reid Hall, in the University of Kent in the Grande Salle

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006

All welcome.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Rendered into English

A reflection on the implications of ‘rendering’ into English concepts and beliefs which derive from another culture and language, from the perspective of writing fiction and the issues that arise in this process.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar and is now best-known as a novelist. His fourth novel Paradise was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994. His latest novel is The Last Gift (2011). His main academic interest is in postcolonial writing and in discourses associated with colonialism, especially as they relate to Africa, the Caribbean and India. He has edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing, has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including Naipaul, Rushdie and Zoe Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press 2007).