RSS FeedUpcoming EventsLunch Poems: Brandon Shimoda, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/236916-lunch-poems-brandon-shimoda

Lunch Poems, Berkeley’s storied noontime poetry series, welcomes Brandon Shimoda.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including: The Grave on the Wall, recipient of the PEN Open Book Award; Evening Oracle, recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; and his two-volume Tucson/desert book, The Desert. His latest work, Hydra Medusa, was published by Nightboat Books this year. He is an associate professor at Colorado College, and curator of the Hiroshima Library, an itinerant reading room/collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/236916-lunch-poems-brandon-shimoda
Cripping Performance in Shakespeare’s Disability Play, a lecture by Professor Katherine Schaap Williams, April 9https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/243310-cripping-performance-in-shakespeares-disability-play-

2022 was the year of Richard III, with three major productions—at The Public Theater in New York (USA), Stratford Festival in Ontario (Canada), and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon (UK). I take up these three prominent examples to ask: what do they reveal about disability aesthetics—and the dramaturgy of disability—in the theater? Analyzing divergent approaches to characterizing Shakespeare’s titular Richard Gloucester, this talk considers how disability drives theatrical experiment and complicates embodied signification.

-Professor Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto)

Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of English; The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; The Florence Green Bixby Chair in English; The Ida May and William J. Eggers Chair in English; The James D. Hart Chair in English; and the Robert Hass Chair in English. 

https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/243310-cripping-performance-in-shakespeares-disability-play-
Shakespeare’s Willy: a Talk with Professor Jessie Hock, April 10https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/243549-shakespeares-willy-a-talk-with-professor-jessie-hock

Hock reads punning in Shakespeare’s “will” sonnets (135 and 136) as activating and ironizing sexual dynamics baked into the Petrarchan tradition. Shakespeare’s crude jokes emerge as a twofold assault on seriousness: first, on the prudishness of the lyric tradition, and second, on the tenacious pieties of literary criticism.

Jessie Hock is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, with a secondary appointment in French and Italian and an affiliation in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She works on English and continental Renaissance and early modern poetry, the history of materialist thought, classical reception history, and contemporary philosophy and critical theory. Her first book, The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), shows how early modern poets read Lucretius’s De rerum natura, the most complete extant exposition of classical atomist philosophy, as a treatise on the poetic imagination, initiating an atomist genealogy at the heart of the lyric tradition. Her recent publications include essays on Lucretius, Michel de Montaigne, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, Gilles Deleuze, and Remy Belleau, and she is also the co-translator (with Alex Dubilet) of two book by contemporary French philosopher, François Laruelle. Her current book project tracks the influence of Lucretian materialism on 20th and 21st century philosophy and theory.

https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/243549-shakespeares-willy-a-talk-with-professor-jessie-hock
Holloway Poetry Series: LaTasha Nevada Diggs, April 10https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/236178-holloway-poetry-series-latasha-nevada-diggs

The Holloway Series presents a reading by poet LaTasha Nevada Diggs.

LaTasha Nevada Diggs is a poet and sound artist from Harlem. She is the author of Village (Coffee House Books, 2023), TwERK (Belladonna*, 2013), the chapbooks Ichi-Ban: from the files of muneca morena linda (MOH Press, 1998) and Ni-Ban: Villa Miseria (MOH Press, 2001), and the album “Televisíon” (2003). Her work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Cave Canem, as well as a C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and a Whiting Award. She earned her MFA at California College of the Arts and is currently a faculty member at Stetson University and Brooklyn College.

https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/236178-holloway-poetry-series-latasha-nevada-diggs
Cristina Rivera Garza: Bedri Distinguished Writers Series, April 11https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/236385-cristina-rivera-garza-bedri-distinguished-writers

Professor Cristina Rivera Garza will deliver the 2024 lecture in the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series on April 11th, 2024, at 5 PM in Wheeler Hall, Room 315.

Professor Cristina Rivera Garza is an author, translator and critic. Recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Hogarth, 2023), which was long listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The Taiga Syndrome, trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, (Dorothy Project, 2018) was awarded the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award. Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2020) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle for Criticism. In 2020, she was a MacArthur Fellow and is currently Artist-In-Residence at DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) in Berlin. She is M.D. Anderson Distinguished Professor and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies.

https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/236385-cristina-rivera-garza-bedri-distinguished-writers
Diné Nishłį (I am a Sacred Being): A Boarding School Play, April 13https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/236322-din-nish-i-am-a-sacred-being-a-boarding-school-play

World Premiere Run of Diné Nishłį (I am a Sacred Being): A Boarding School Play by Blossom Johnson. Exuberant, sunny, and delightful, this boarding school comedy celebrates the enthusiastic passions of young Native women. Directed by Daniel Leeman Smith.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

Thurs, April 11 at 2pm: Matinee + Playwright Talkback

Fri, April 12 at 7pm: Media preview/opening

Sat, April 13 at 7pm: Performance

Sun, April 14 at 2pm: Matinee

Four high school girls are thrilled when their song’n’dance group is selected to sing the Navajo National Anthem at the Winter Olympics in 2002. Bursting with excitement, hope, and confidence, the girls’ plans are upset when a teacher thinks one of them left a threatening voicemail. Jumping into action, they launch a plan to get rid of that teacher. Exuberant, sunny, and delightful, this boarding school comedy celebrates the enthusiastic passions of young Native women.

AlterTheater is Berkeley’s 2024-2026 Indigenous Performing Arts Resident company, and Blossom Johnson will be the 2024 Indigenous Performing Arts artist-in-residence.

Blossom Johnson is a Diné storyteller, playwright, teaching artist and screenwriter. She is from the Yé’ii Dine’é Táchii’nii (Giant People) clan, and her maternal grandfather is from the Deeshchíí’nii (Start of the Red Streak People) clan.

Blossom has been commissioned by AlterTheatre Ensemble and has been awarded a residency with Willowtail Springs/Durango PlayFest. She is excited to make a smooth transition from theater to film narrative with the In Progress NEXUS Program in St. Paul, MN. Additionally, she has been awarded the 2022 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellowship, La Lengua/ AlterTheater Ensemble’s Decolonization Stories Commission 2022 and is proud to be a recipient of The Playwrights’ Center 2022-23 Jerome Fellowship. She is a mentee in writing for animation with the Netflix Animation Foundations Program 2022. As a dramaturg, Blossom has worked with Native Voices at the Autry, UCSB Launch Pad, PlayPenn, Urbanite Theatre, New Native Theatre and YIPAP (Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program). She has served as a panelist and script reader for the 22′ Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellowship and the 22′ New Harmony Project. Blossom holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and a BA in Theatre from Arizona State University. A proud member of the Dramatists Guild, and the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA).

She was raised by her grandmother on the very top of Dził Yijiin (Black Mesa), AZ and she’s always been surrounded by stories. When she opens the front door of her grandma’s yellow house, she can see a coal mine. Below the mesa is an old run-down restaurant where her mother used to hustle as a waitress during the summer in her teen years, and there is an old store where her grandmother would up-sale her hand made jewelry to tourists by the entrance, but the restaurant and the store has now been closed for years because what was taken from the earth was diminished, so no one stayed, and they eventually went out of business.

The people that stayed are Diné, and their stories, her stories, are thriving. When she creates, she writes for her people and the stories she writes come from memories, experiences, and family history. In her writing, she reveals truths that are hard to face but she balances the darkness with humor, so the viewer has a chance to breathe and laugh.

/live/events/236322-din-nish-i-am-a-sacred-being-a-boarding-school-play
Holloway Poetry Series: Tim Wood, April 17https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/237723-holloway-poetry-series-tim-wood

The Holloway Series presents a reading by poet Tim Wood.

Tim Wood is the author of Otherwise Known as Home (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Notched Sunsets (Atelos, 2016). He is co-editor of The Hip Hop Reader (Longman, 2008), and his critical work has been published in Jacket2, Convolution, the Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and the Boston Review. He earned his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley, an M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently an associate professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York. In Spring 2024, he is Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley. 

https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/237723-holloway-poetry-series-tim-wood
The Loft Hour: Cathy Park Hong + Timmia Hearn DeRoy, April 18https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/218703-the-loft-hour-cathy-park-hong-timmia-hearn-deroy

The Loft Hour:
Cathy Park Hong
+ Timmia Hearn DeRoy

in conversation with Abigail De Kosnik


Thursday, April 18, 2024
12 – 1pm
ARC, Hearst Field Annex D23

Elevate your lunch break with The Loft Hour, a new year-long series that invites new arts faculty to riff on their work over lunch, in an informal conversation moderated by an ARC-affiliated faculty member. The April program features Cathy Park Hong (English) and Timmia DeRoy (Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies) in conversation with Abigail De Kosnik.

Cathy Park Hong is a writer and poet who has published three volumes of poetry, with her creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings (2020) being both a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She was also named on Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list, as well as a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

A child of Korean parents, Park Hong grew up in Los Angeles before earning her B.A. from Oberlin College and MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. http://cathyparkhong.com/index.html

Timmia Hearn DeRoy is a practitioner and scholar of social justice-based theatre and film. She was a founding member of the Trinidad and Tobago PRIDE Arts Festival, former Director of the School for the Arts at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, the Caribbean’s oldest theatre company, and former Marketing Manager at the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival. She works in areas of post-colonial theater practice, transnational feminist praxis, and Disability Justice, and engages in community-oriented and social change focused theater across the Diasporas to which she belongs. Timmia’s directing credits include 10,000: A One-Woman New Play Development by Victoria Taurean (2020) at the Lawrence Arts Center, In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks (2019) at the KU University Theatre, an original I Am One musical comedy called Buss de Mark (2016) which premiered at the PRIDE Arts Festival in Trinidad, and more. Timmia holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Kansas, and a B.A. in Theatre Studies from Yale University. You can see her work at TimmiaHearn.com.

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS), and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies, Film & Media, and Folklore. She is the 2020-2025 craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media. She researches histories and theories of new media, film and television, social media, fan studies, piracy studies, cultural memory, and archive studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies. De Kosnik is currently writing a book on media piracy in the U.S. by queer and BIPOC users tentatively titled Minority Piracy. She is faculty co-organizer of The Color of New Media, a working group that focuses on the overlap of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies (sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender with additional support from BCNM). De Kosnik is Filipina American.

/live/events/218703-the-loft-hour-cathy-park-hong-timmia-hearn-deroy
2024 Charles Mills Gayley Lecture: Professor Stephen Best, April 18https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/240460-2024-charles-mills-gayley-lecture-professor

Stephen Best, Professor & Rachael Anderson Stageberg Chair in English, will deliver the annual Charles Mills Gayley Lecture on April 18th at 5 PM.

Stephen Best’s scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an exploration of where the limits of historicism as a mode of literary study may lay, especially where that search manifests as an interest in alternatives to suspicious reading in the text-based disciplines. To this end, Professor Best has edited a number of special issues of the journal Representations (on whose board he sits) – “Redress” (with Saidiya Hartman), on theoretical and political projects to undo the slave past, “The Way We Read Now” (with Sharon Marcus), on the limits of symptomatic reading, and “Description Across Disciplines” (with Sharon Marcus and Heather Love), on disciplinary valuations of description as critical practice.

Best is the author of two books: The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession(link is external)(link is external)(link is external) (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture; and, most recently, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life(link is external)(link is external)(link is external) (Duke University Press, 2018).

His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute (University of California), and the Ford Foundation. In 2015-2016, he was the Mary Bundy Scott Professor at Williams College, and in spring 2020 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is currently director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

https://events.berkeley.edu/english/event/240460-2024-charles-mills-gayley-lecture-professor