Fordham helps host 'Festival de la Palabra'

(R to L) Pedro Antonio Valdez, Luis Negron and Anna Lidia Vega Serova / Photo by Gina Vergel

Fordham recently played host to the third annual Festival de la Palabra / Festival of the Word—an event that celebrates Spanish language writers.

The event began on Oct. 4 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It continued with more than 30 diverse writers from Spain and Latin America at various venues across New York City from Oct. 8-11.

La Festival de la Palabra is an international literary festival that brings together some of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in Spanish with diverse academic and non-academic community audiences to debate, explore, and celebrate writing from Latin America, Spain and its Spanish-speaking diasporas, including the United States, said Mayra Santos-Febres, a Puerto Rican author, poet, novelist, professor of literature, and literary critic who has garnered fame at home and abroad for her first two collections of poetry, Anamu y manigua and El orden escapado.

“We know Puerto Rico is a natural destination for so many kinds of tourism,” she says. “Three years ago we asked ourselves, why not host a literary festival in order to attract even more people?”

This year’s festival included writers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guadaloupe-France, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Spain to New York City to participate in readings, presentations, for a, debates, and workshops.

At Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Oct. 11, there were readings and discussion on, “Writing (in) the Hispanic Caribbean,” with Anna Lidia Vega Serova of Cuba, Pedro Antonio Valdez of the Dominican Republic, and Luis Negron of Puerto Rico. The event was hosted by the Department of Modern Languages and Literature.

Dominican writer, Valdez, said people have accused be of being too Dominican in his work. Responding to a student question about the inspiration for his stories, he said, “I want to tell the stories of my barrio. I want to impress what it is like to my readers.”

Writer Charlie Vázquez, author of the novel Contraband (Rebel Satori Press, 2010), and the bilingual poems Meditations, coordinated the New York City portion of the festival and helped choose the writers along with Febres and a colleague in Lisbon.

As an active writer, Vázquez says he felt honored to invite friends who are actively writing and publishing to participate in the festival.

“And they, in turn, get to meet writers from around the world,” he said, adding that the festival has inspired him to start writing in Spanish.

“I was educated in English in New York City public schools and brought up in bilingual homes where some of my older relatives only spoke Spanish. One of the things I’ve learned as a result of all of this is that Spanish is more than just a beautiful and popular and inherently poetic language, it’s also a passport to a large portion of the Earth’s readers, on different continents. I have grown as a writer because of it, and that, in itself, is a priceless education,” Vázquez said.

-Gina Vergel

Music and Poetry to Come Together in Annual Concert at Lincoln Center Campus

Lawrence Kramer, Ph.D., built a distinguished scholarly career around the relationship between his two passions, music and literature. So it was only a matter of time before he would come up with the idea for the event that will be held Saturday, April 28 at the Lincoln Center campus.

 

He was chatting with colleagues about the University’s Poets Out Loud program a few years ago when the conversation turned to music. “This sort of light bulb went on in my head,” said Kramer, Distinguished Professor in the Department of English.

The result was a series of concerts that combine poetry readings with performances of the poems’ musical versions. The third annual event in the series, Voices Up: New Music for New Poetry, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the 12th-Floor Lounge of the Lowenstein Building. The concert was organized in conjunction with Poets Out Loud. Admission is free.

The event will feature original works by several prize-winning artists. A cellist, violinist and vocalist will perform new works by composers Paul Moravec—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—and David Dzubay, who wrote music for poems by Julie Choffel. Choffel, a member of the faculty at the University of Connecticut, will read from her book The Hello Delay, published by Fordham University Press. The book was the winner of the Poets Out Loud book competition for 2012.

The accompanying music will be performed by violinist Madalyn Parnas, cellist Cicely Parnas, and soprano Sharon Harms, all of whom are students at Indiana University, where David Dzubay teaches. Because their lineup includes the premiere of a piece by Kramer, who is a prize-winning composer, he will read the poetry he wrote as the song's lyrics. In addition, a work by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, comprising fragments from the work of Franz Kafka, will be performed.

This year’s event departs from the standard voice-and-piano format of classical song. The combination of violin, cello and voice “creates all kinds of interesting possibilities, which we’re eager to explore,” Kramer said.

He noted that the event belongs to a centuries-long tradition of marrying poetry with music. He cited the example of prolific composer Franz Schubert, an avid reader of poetry and friend of many poets, who wrote his songs using their poems as lyrics as soon as they were published.

 

“That’s the way it works in the world of classical song,” he said. “The idea is that you create a relationship between musical expression and poetic expression.”

 

Because it can be distracting for audience members to follow the poet’s words on paper, he said, the format includes no copies of the poems. Audience members will only listen: First they will hear the poem read, and then they will hear it sung.

 

“What happens is the expressive additions that come about by putting it to music become more available to people, because they’ve heard the poet reading the poem in the poet’s own voice,” he said. “That really has an impact, we discovered.”

 

                                                                                                                            -- Chris Gosier

In Praise of the Essay

Symposium: In Praise of the Essay: Practice & Form

Co-Sponsored by the English Department and Creative Writing Program at Fordham University

Saturday, April 24, 2010 | Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus Atrium

For Registration Please Call: (717) 357-9609. You will also need to complete this form (includes complete schedule) and bring it with you to the symposium. There is a $150 attendance fee.

Keynote Speaker: Robert Atwan, series editor, Best American Essays. Featured speakers include: Jerald Walker, Vivian Gornick, Brian Doyle, Lia Purpura and Emily Grosholz. Panelists include: Paul Lisicky, New York University; Mimi Schwartz, Richard Stockton College; Michael Steinberg, Pine Manor College; Elizabeth Stone, Fordham University; and Linda Underhill, Chatham University.

About the Presenters and Panelists

Robert Atwan is the series editor of Best American Essays, which he founded in 1985. He has edited five college anthologies and textbooks, seven poetry anthologies, and a short story collection. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, River Teeth, and elsewhere.

Brian Doyle is the author of seven works of nonfiction, including The Grail, The Wet Engine, and Leaping: Revelations & Epiphanies, as well as two collections of “proems.” A novel, Mink River, is forthcoming in fall 2010. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, Gourmet, Harper’s, Orion, the Times of London, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Portland Magazine.

Vivian Gornick is the author of many books, including Women in Science, Fierce Attachments, The Situation and the Story, Approaching Eye Level, and The End of the Novel of Love. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the New School.

Emily Grosholz is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Feuilles/Leaves; three books of philosophy; and the editor of essay collections on Simone de Beauvoir, W. E. B. DuBois, Maxine Kumin, and the philosophy of mathematics. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at Pennsylvania State University.

Lia Purpura is the author of two collections of essays, On Looking and Increase, and several collections of poems, including King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, and Brighter the Veil. Her work has appeared in AGNI, the Georgia Review, Orion, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Loyola University and the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.

Jerald Walker is the author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion and Redemption. His essays have appeared in Best African American Essays, Best American Essays, Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, Chronicle of Higher Education, the Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Mother Jones, North American Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He teaches at Bridgewater State College.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder. A new novel, Lumina Harbor, is forthcoming. His work has appeared in Boulevard, Flash Fiction, Hotel Amerika, Open House, Ploughshares, Short Takes, and many other anthologies and magazines. He teaches at New York University.

Mimi Schwartz is the author of five books, including Good Neighbors, Bad Times. Echoes of My Father’s German Village; Thoughts from a Queen-sized Bed; and, with Sondra Perl, Writing True: the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Creative Nonfiction, the Missouri Review, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She is Professor Emerita at Richard Stockton College.

Mike Steinberg is founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. He has written or co-written five books, including a memoir, Still Pitching, and, with Robert Root, an anthology, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. He is writer-in-residence in the Solstice/Pine Manor College low-residency MFA program.

Elizabeth Stone is the author of Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us, The Hunter College Campus Schools for the Gifted, and A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from Her Student. Her personal essays and reportage have appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches at Fordham University.

Linda Underhill is the author of two collections of essays, The Unequal Hours: Moments of Being in the Natural World and The Way of the Woods: Journeys through American Forests. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University and at Corning Community College.

Junot Diaz at Rose Hill

The Brief, Wondrous Appearance of Junot Diaz

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz will read from his work and sign books on Wednesday, April 15 at 5 p.m. in the Keating First lecture hall, Keating Hall, on the Rose Hill campus.

Diaz, who won the 2008 Pulitzer for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Hardcover, 2007), is also the author of the short story collection Drown (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1996).

For more information please contact Daniel T. Contreras at
dcontreras@fordham.edu

Director of Creative Writing Lauded

Sarah Gambito, assistant professor of English and the new director of creative writing at Fordham, was awarded one of three Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards for service to the literary community.

Gambito is the co-founder of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization that promotes Asian-American poetry. She is the author of Matadora (Alice James Books, 2004) and Delivered, forthcoming from Persea Books. Her poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, Fence, Field, The New Republic, and other journals. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Urban Artists Initiative.

Russell Banks and Robert Caro are the other two recipients of the 2009 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards, and Daniel Halpern is the recipient of the inaugural Editors’ Award. Poets & Writers established the Writers for Writers Award in 1996 to recognize authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. The title of the awards has been given to Barnes & Noble in appreciation of their sponsorship of Poets & Writers. The awards will be presented at Poets & Writers’ annual gala benefit, In Celebration of Writers, on March 25, 2009 in New York City.