The UTSA Creative Writing Reading Series was inaugurated in 1983 when Carolyn Forché read on a Friday afternoon to a room of 100 people. Over the years, the series has hosted such writers as Mary Oliver, Ernest Gaines, Tobias Wolff, Denise Levertov, Alberto Ríos, Pat Mora, Diane Wakoski, Edward Hirsch, and many other poets and fiction writers who not only give public readings but also visit classes and meet with students about their writing. We’ve had as many as twelve readings by visiting writers in a year, but have settled on three or four annually as an ideal number.
Jessica Lopez
January 27, 2012—7:30 p.m.University Room (BB 2.06.04)
A three-time member of the City of Albuquerque Slam Team and the 2008 National Champion UNM Lobo Slam Team, Jessica Lopez has been the Poet-in-Residence in several New Mexico high schools and continues her work in the classroom as well as with not-for-profit poetry events in New Mexico. Her first collection of poetry is Always Messing with Them Boys (West End Press, 2011). Her work has also been published in UNM Press’s A Bigger Boat: The Unlikely Success of the Albuquerque Slam Scene, Chicago Open Mic America, Volume 1, Feminism Now, and Poetic Diversity.
John Phillip Santos
February 17, 2012—7:30 p.m.University Room (BB 2.06.04)
Recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Oxford Prize for fiction, and the Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy, John Phillip Santos’ Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (Penguin, 1999) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other books include The Farthest Home Is an Empire of Fire (Viking, 2010) and Songs Older Than Any Known Singer: Selected and New Poems (Wings Press, 2007). Santos has published dozens of articles in such venues as the Los Angeles Times, San Antonio Express-News, andthe New York Times, and has also produced over forty documentaries. He is the University Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies in UTSA’s Honors College.
Critical Insights: Albert Camus by Steven G. Kellman* www.salempress.com**
Throughout his career and in the decades following his premature death in 1960, Albert Camus gained a large and avid international readership. But he has also attracted the interest of scholars from many disciplines, specialists in literature, theater, philosophy, theology, political science, history, psychology, medicine, and law. His novels, stories, essays, and plays have been examined within the context of their historical moment, the troubled period before, during, and after World War II. They have been studied for their distinctive, economic styles, their innovative use of narrative perspective, and their thematic preoccupation with alienation and injustice. His work has been read as a contribution to moral and political philosophy and to an understanding of personality disorders, legal theory, and personal identity. An essay on his critical reception describes the variety of ways in which Camus has been read, themes that have inspired discussion, and points of continuing controversy. Camus’s own reaction to his hostile critics, particularly his erstwhile friend Jean-Paul Sartre, led to the bitterness pervading The Fall and Exile and the Kingdom. After more than seventy years, the accumulated commentary on Camus constitutes a rich and lively conversation to which this volume offers original contributions, while also reprinting a sampling of some of the more trenchant earlier essays about the man and his work. Camus lived his work, and long before he conceived The First Man, the autobiographical novel whose unfinished manuscript was found at the scene of the crash that took his life, Camus’s life and work were unusually intertwined. As explained in the biographical overview, Camus was decisively shaped by his native Algeria, a North African outpost of France in which, as the French-speaking grandson of European settlers, he remained an outsider. The fact that Camus became famous with the publication of his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942, and remained one of Europe’s leading literary celebrities had profound effects on his life and work. So, too, did his embrace and subsequent repudiation by Sartre and his coterie of Existentialists. Camus is probably best known as the author of a novel in which a European Algerian named Meursault gratuitously murders an Arab on the beach. Setting his fiction again and again in North Africa, he wrote about what he knew best, the colonial community. Reacting against dismissals of Camus as an apologist for French colonial rule, Margerrison offers an informed and nuanced analysis of his Algerian identity and his acquaintance with the North African communities outside the one into which he was born. For more information, please visit: www.salempress.com. *English Department, UTSA, professor of comparative literature, modern and contemporary literature, European and American fiction, film, biography, and literary theory **This summary of the book is adapted from the publisher’s website.
Sagebrush Review; Volume 6, Summer 2011
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