Archives

MIT Writers Series
Free and open to public

Thrity Umrigar – The Weight of Heaven
September 24, 2009 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120 Thrity Umrigar's recently published novel The Weight of Heaven focuses on a grieving American couple who take work in a village outside Bombay. The Boston Globe saw the "grindingly sad personal story of Frank and Ellie" as "a metaphor for the corruption of global business based on poverty and the explotation of natural resources."

Thomas Levenson – Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist
October 6, 2009 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120 Tom Levenson, Director of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, will read from his latest book Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.  In this book, Levenson reveals the remarkable and true tale of Sir Isaac Newton as Warden of the Royal Mint.

Andrea Barrett – The Air We Breathe
October 15, 2009 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120
Andrea Barrett is the author of six novels, most recently The Air We Breathe, and two collections of short fiction, Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award, and Servants of the Map, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Merlinda Bobis – “Hush, I know a Story You Don’t Know: The Small Story/the Big Politics.”
October 30, 2009 - 4:00PM, Room 4-231
Merlinda Bobis, University of Wollongong, Australia, will speak on her latest novel The Solemn Lantern Maker
The death of a human story is as violent as the death of a human being. It is double-murder: people are killed in conflict, then their story is killed by the official narrative. The ‘killing of story’ is symbolic violence, commonplace and insidious. In this lecture, writer Merlinda Bobis will discuss the dangerous imbalance between the privileged master narrative and the small, human story. Charting the writing of her new novel, ‘The Solemn Lantern Maker’, she will attempt to answer these questions: How do we write the human tale into the large social and political structures? How do we re-instate it in the public’s consciousness? How do we render the invisible visible?

Vivek Bald – Filmmaker
February 11, 2010 - 7:00PM, Room 6-120
Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem.

Basharat Peer – Journalist and author
March 4, 2010 - 7:00PM, Room 6-120
Basharat Peer is a Kashmiri journalist and author who has worked as an editor at Foreign Affairs and is the author of the acclaimed memoir Curfewed Night. He served as a correspondent at Tehelka, an English-language investigative newsweekly, and has contributed to the New Statesman, the Nation, the Financial Times Magazine, the Guardian, and the Times of India, among other publications. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Carlo Rotella – Journalist and author
March 4, 2010 - 7:00PM, Room 6-120
Carlo Rotella is the author, mostly recently, of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England award, and he writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and Slate. He is Director of American Studies at Boston College.

Kym Ragusa
September 30, 2010, 7:00PM, 6-120
Kym Ragusa currently teaches Nonfiction in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in the Writing and Humanistic Studies Program at MIT.  She is the recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and an Ida and Daniel Lang Award for Excellence in the Humanities. She has taught Creative Writing at City College, Queens College, and Eugene Lang College in New York, and at Josai International University in Japan. The Skin Between Us was named a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Foundation's 2007 Legacy Award in Nonfiction, and was published in Italy in May, 2008. Interview with Kym Ragusa

Eileen Myles
October 7, 2010 - 7:00PM, 6-120
Eileen Myles graduated from UMass (Boston) in 1971. She came to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Inferno (a poet's novel) chronicles the adventures of a female writer in hell very much like Eileen Myles. (Read an excerpt from Inferno.) Myles first became known to many people for her openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States in 1991-92. She received her poetic education at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in 1975-77 where she participated in workshops lead by Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan and others. In 1977 and 79 she published issues of dodgems,a poetry magazine which presented a collision of New York School, Language Poetry, performance texts and other likely aesthetics of the time. She co-edited the feminist anthology Ladies Museum (w Timmons, Kraut and Notley), worked as assistant to poet James Schuyler in 1979, and was a founding member of the Lost Texans Collective (w Nauen & McKay) which produced Joan of Arc a spiritual entertainment and Patriarchy, a play.
She is a Professor Emeritus of writing &literature at UC San Diego where she taught from 2002 to 2007.  In Spring, 2010 she was the Hugo Writer at U. of Montana in Missoula. In November of 2010 she will be Fannie Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She contributes to a wide number of publications including Art Forum, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, TimeOut, Book Forum and AnOther Magazine. She received an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writers' grant for “Iceland.” The Poetry Society of American awarded her the Shelley Prize in 2010.

Jerald Walker
November 2, 2010, 7:00PM, 6-120 Jerald Walker is the author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion and Redemption, described by Publishers Weekly as "spectacular" and The Economist as "inspiring." Prior to teaching at Emerson, Walker was an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State College, where he received several accolades for teaching and founded an award-winning literary/arts journal (The Bridge) as well as a summer nonfiction writing retreat (the New England Writing Institute). He has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the James A. Michener Foundation. Interview with Jerald Walker

Poetry@MIT Series
Free and open to public

Pamela Alexander Slow Fire
October 20, 2009 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120
Pamela Alexander's fourth collection of poems, Slow Fire, came out in 2007 from Ausable Press (now acquired by Copper Canyon).  Earlier books of hers won major awards, including selection by James Merrill for the Yale Younger Poet series and an Iowa Poetry Prize.  She is currently working in nonfiction as well as poetry.

John Koethe Ninety-fifth Street
November 12, 2009 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 32-141 Poet John Koethe's new book is Ninety-fifth Street.  Sally's Hair is his previous book and his North Point North: New & Selected Poems came out in 2003.

Sabrina Orah Mark
March 18, 2010 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120
Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of The Babies (2004) and Tsim Tsum (2009). She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Glenn Schaeffer Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in many journals and in the anthologies, Legitimate Dangers and The Best American Poetry 2007. She teaches at the University of Georgia.

Norma Cole
April 8, 2010 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120
Among Norma Cole's poetry books are Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008, NATURAL LIGHT and Do the Monkey. TO BE AT MUSIC (essays) is forthcoming from Omnidawn Press. Cole has received awards from the Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards, Fund for Poetry and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Fanny Howe/Katie Peterson
October 21, 2010, 7:00PM, 6-120
Read poems by Fanny Howe and Katie Peterson
Fanny Howe is an American poet novelist, and short story writer. Howe is the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. She has become (arguably) one of the most widely read of American experimental poets. She has also published several volumes of prose, including Lives of the Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005) and The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003), a collection of essays.
Katie Peterson attended Stanford University and did graduate work in the department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, completing a dissertation on Emily Dickinson and selflessness. She has published poems and prose in several journals, and has been a visiting Professor of Poetry at Deep Springs College, an experimental school and ranch in the desert of California.

Ed Barrett and William Corbett
reading from their new books - more ...
April 21, 2011 - 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120
Opening Ed Barrett’s Down New Utrecht Avenue is like happening on a mint-condition, hitherto unknown set of chromolithograph baseball cards of an unimaginable rarity. Yes, but what do I do with them? You don’t have to do anything, the “unimaginable” takes care of that. Just sit and let them wash over you pleasantly but firmly, like“a three-game series raveling and unraveling the hajj of things drifting through you.” - John Ashbery
William Corbett has written of The Whalen Poem--"I spent the summer of 2007 reading the galleys of Philip Whalen's Collected Poems. I was in Vermont and had the leisure to read slowly, ten or so pages a day. About halfway through the master's poems I began to write The Whalen Poem. I kept at it until just after Halloween. No book I have written, poetry or prose, has given me the deep pleasure I felt in writing The Whalen Poem.

Purple Blurb Series
Free and open to public

Noah Wardrip-Fruin
September 14, 2009 - 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press, 2009), co-creator of Screen (among other works of digital writing), and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Mary Flanagan
November 2, 2009 - 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310
Mary Flanagan is author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009), creator of [giantJoystick], and author of [theHouse] (among other digitial writing works). She is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth.

D. Fox Harrell
November 16, 2009 - 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310
D. Fox Harrell is the creator of the GRIOT system for computational narrative and author of several works in this system, including Loss, Undersea and The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs. He is assistant professor of digital media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Marina Bers
November 30, 2009 - 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310
Marina Bers is author of Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2007) and creator of the system Zora. She is associate professor in the Department of Child Development and adjunct professor in the department of computer sciences at Tufts University.
 
Roderick Coover and Nitin Sawhney
March 1, 2010 - 5:30PM, MIT Room 14E-310
Canyonlands by Roderick Coover; Strawberries, Roosters and the Chocolate Seas by Nitin Sawhney.

Canyonlands is Coover's film and interactive documentary about the works of the novelist and essayist, Edward Abbey (1927-1989).

Strawberries, Roosters and the Chocolate Seas , an upcoming feature-length documentary by Nitin Sawhney, is a personal journey into the heart of Gaza using a satirical and poetic rendering of everyday life and the extraordinary events witnessed by the filmmaker, during his visit there one year after the 22-day siege in January 2009. Sawhney is a research fellow in the Program in Art, Culture and Technology in the MIT Department of Architecture. In 2006, he co-founded the Voices Beyond Walls initiative for digital storytelling in Palestinian refugee camps.

Stephanie Strickland
March 8, 2010 - 5:30PM, MIT Room 14E-310
Readings by print and hypermedia poet Stephanie Strickland from four collaborative digital poems created over the past 12 years, each of which uses the screen differently: V: Vniverse , Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot , Errand Upon Which We Came , and slippingglimpse. In addition to having written the digital poems mentioned above, she has published five books: Zone : Zero, V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L'una , True North , The Red Virgin: A Poem Of Simone Weil , and Give the Body Back.

Jeremy Freese and Emily Short
March 29, 2010 - 5:30PM, MIT Room 14E-310
Freese's Violet is an interactive short story about romance and procrastination in which the main character is struggling to complete his dissertation. The things that happen in the simulated graduate student office are narrated to the player by the (imaginary) voice of the main character's Australian girlfriend. Violet won several XYZZY awards in 2008, including the award for Best Game, and was the winner of the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. He is a professor in the Department of Sociology, School of Communication, and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Emily Short's Alabaster is a fractured fairy tale by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Emily Short, Adam Thornton, and Ziv Wities, illustrated by Daniel Allington-Krzysztofiak. This interactive fiction is an experiment in open authorship. The introduction to the story was written and released by Short in 2008. The game is implemented in Inform 7 using a conversation system, developed by Short, that will be released for general use by Inform 7 developers. There are 18 possible endings to Alabaster. She is also author/colloborator on more than two dozen interactive fictions.

John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe
April 28, 2010 - 7:30PM, MIT Room 14E-310
John Cayley writes digital media, particularly in the domain of poetry and poetics. Information on his works may be found at programmatology.shadoof.net. Cayley is a visiting professor at Brown University, Literary Arts Program.
Daniel C. Howe is a digital artist and researcher whose work explores the intersections of literature, computation, and procedural art practice. He recently received his PhD (on generative literary systems) from the Media Research Lab at NYU and was awarded a Computing Innovations fellowship from the National Science Foundation for 2010. He currently resides in Providence, RI where he teaches at Brown and RISD, and is a resident artist at AS220.
Designed to support the creation of novel works of digital literature, Daniel C. Howe 's RiTa library, in which The Readers Project (a collection of distributed, performative, quasi-autonomous poetic 'Readers' - active, procedural entities with distinct reading behaviors and strategies) is implemented, provides a unique set of tools for artists and writers working in programmable media. RiTa is free and open-source and integrates with the popular Processing environment for digital arts programming.

TUESDAY March 8, 2011
7pm Bartos 20 Ames Street Building E15, Atrium Level
Computers and Creativity: The Intersection of Art and Technology
Podcast: From Purple Blurb, "Computers and Creativity: The Intersection of Art and Technology"
A discussion moderated by John Maeda, President, Rhode Island School of Design
Leah Buechley, MIT Media Lab
John Cayley, Brown University Literary Arts
George Fifield, curator & Boston Cyberarts Festival
Mark Wilson, exhibiting artist
Held in collaboration with the deCordova Museum on the occasion of the Drawing with Code exhibit

THURSDAY March 31, 2011
4pm 2-105
Between Page and Screen: Digital, Visual & Material Poetics
Amaranth Borsuk, MIT Mellon postdoctoral fellow, WHS & CMS
Held in collaboration with the Comparative Media Studies Colloquium Series

SATURDAY May 7, 2011
3pm 6-120
Adventuresome Creations: Interactive Fiction, Graphical Adventures & Electronic Literature
Brian Moriarty, Creator of Wishbringer, Trinity, Loom, professor of practice, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Clara Fernández-Vara, Creator of Rosemary, Symon, MIT postdoctoral researcher, GAMBIT
Zuzana Husárová, Creator of Pulse, MIT Fulbright scholar, the Trope Tank
Part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival 

Writing Program Lunch Series
By invitation only

Joe Haldeman, Adjunct Professor
October 26, 2010 - 12:00 noon In October 2010 WHS started the Writing Program Lunch Series. The first talk was by Joe Haldeman, Adjunct Professor, on "Inkwell and Computer - Low and High Technologies in Creative Writing" - View Talk He was named the 2010 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master. The Grand Master award is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's highest accolade and recognizes excellence for a lifetime of contributions to the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

Alan Lightman
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Room 14E-304 / 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm

"Two new books in progress, a memoir and a fantasy, and my writing process"

"I will briefly discuss my own writing habits (and bad habits) and then move on to particular problems I faced in two new books in press. The first, a partly fictionalized memoir titled Screening Room, is about my growing up in Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s -- the music, the food, racism, Southern culture, and my family business in the movies. How does one deal with still living relatives, what can one fictionalize, etc? The second book, a novel titled Mr g, is the story of Creation as told by God. God is the narrator. How does one deal with metaphor before the existence of time and space? How can one be respectful of religious beliefs while portraying God in a partly comic story (Mr g has an aunt and uncle constantly giving Him advice)? etc."
-- Alan Lightman