Department Events Fall 2024
November 13, 2024 - A Reading and Discussion with Rita Bullwinkel
Join us for an evening with Rita Bullwinkel, the acclaimed author of Headshot, longlisted for the 2024 Booker Award, and the award-winning story collection Belly Up. A 2022 Whiting Award recipient, Rita currently serves as the editor of McSweeney鈥檚 Quarterly and a Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. Come hear her discuss her work and the craft of writing, followed by a Q&A session that offers a unique opportunity to engage with her insights.
Free and open to the public.
Event will be held at 4:15 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
Past Events
October 10, 2024 - Talk with Jeff Dolven
Join us for an enlightening evening with Jeff Dolven, renowned scholar and author, as he shares his insights on literature and poetics. This special event, hosted by the English Department, promises to inspire and engage. Don鈥檛 miss this opportunity to hear from a leading voice in the field!
Event will be held at 4:30 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
October 24, 2024 - Lucy Ives on An Image Of My Name Enters America: Essays
You're invited to a reading and discussion with Lucy Ives.
Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World, Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, and Life Is Everywhere, a New Yorker best book of 2022. Ives's writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, frieze, Granta, Harper's, n+1, and Vogue, among other publications. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. She is currently Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown.
Free and open to the public.
Event will be held at 4:15 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
September 5, 2024 - Summer Project Presentations
Welcome to our first English event of the year! Join us for an evening of literary celebration with refreshments and a thought-provoking symposium. Connect with your fellow book lovers, reconnect with old friends, and explore how our summer project students have pursued their research curiosities through reading and writing. It鈥檚 a perfect opportunity to dive into the intellectual and creative pursuits of our community. We look forward to seeing you there!
Event will be held at 4:15 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
May 11, 2024 - Class Day Reception
Join the English Department in celebrating our graduating seniors! Refreshments will be served.
Event will be held from 11am-1pm in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
February 21, 2024 - "Clothed in our Fraile Attire": Textile and Texts in the Works of Aemilia Lanyer
Please join us for a talk from poet, literary critic, and professor Kimberly Johnson.
1611 saw the publication of a book remarkable not only for its ambitious scope and its boldly protofeminist rewritings of familiar biblical stories, but also because it was authored by a woman. In her volume Salve Deus Rex ludaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer uses a number of metaphors taken from the fabric arts鈥攕ewing, embroidery, and other housewifely concerns鈥攁nd she frequently stitches together her spiritual contemplations with terminology from sempstressry. This pattern, which is continuous throughout both her great poetic work and the dedicatory poems that preface it, spins a connective thread between Christ's incarnation and the domestic sphere鈥攖he province of women's authority. This talk will show how Lanyer uses language from what is conventionally dismissed as mere women's work to claim Christ under the authority of women.
This event will be held at 4:30 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
February 22, 2024 - Reading and Artists Talk from Layli Long Soldier
Please join us for a reading and artist talk from poet, writer, and artist Layli Long Soldier. This event will also be broadcast live over the air with KSPC鈥搕une in to 88.7fm or stream online at kspc.org.
Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She is a mentor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This event will be held at 4:30PM PST in the Rose Hills Theater, with a reception to follow the reading.
February 29, 2024 - A Poetry Reading with Toby Altman
Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy's Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). Altman has held fellowships from the Graham Foundation, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Altman is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Beloit College. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the lowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, where his dissertation "The Shock of the Old: Periodization, Poetics, and Diachronic Exchange between the Renaissance and the Avant-Garde," received the Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation. His criticism has been widely published, including articles and essays in Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, The Georgia Review, and Jack.
This event will be held at 4:30 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
March 20, 2024 - Four 'First Novelists' from the 5Cs
Please join us in this unique celebration of four writers just setting out on remarkable careers, all of whom were recently part of our Claremont creative writing community.
Francesca Capossela (Trouble the Living, Pomona 鈥18)
David Connor (Oh God, The Sun Goes, Pomona 鈥15)
Julius Taranto (How I Won a Nobel Prize, Pomona 鈥12)
Tyriek White (We Are A Haunting, Pitzer 鈥13)
The readings and conversation will be introduced by Pomona Professor Jonathan Lethem and four special 鈥渕entor鈥 guests: Charmaine Craig (Pomona), Brian Evenson (Cal Arts MFA), Laura Harris (Pitzer), Kevin Dettmar (Pomona).
Event will be held at 7:00PM at the Rose Hills Theater. Admission is free, seating unreserved.
March 25, 2024 - 脪scar Mois茅s Diaz Poetry Reading
Diaz will read new and old poems based on dreams. The new poems in particular all engage with medieval Islamic dream dictionaries.
脪scar Mois茅s D铆az is a poet-astrologer, film curator, and artist. They鈥檝e exhibited art in places such as the 10th Central American Biennial, International Film Festival of El Salvador, Queens Museum, The Museum of Art El Salvador, and a solo exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Costa Rica. They are an inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Poetry Project, NYC. They are a member of and a contributing editor at . Recent poems can be found in Schlag Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes and Screen Door Review.
Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.
March 26, 2024 - In Collaboration with Pomona's Art Department: Grace Rosario Perkins Artist Talk
Grace Rosario Perkins (b. 1986, Santa Fe, NM, lives and works in Brooklyn) is a self-taught Din茅/Akimel O鈥檕dham painter interested in disassembling her personal narrative through layered words, objects, colors, and signs. Recent exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibition, The Relevance of Your Data (MOCA Tucson, curated by Laura Copelin, 2022), which featured large-scale paintings alongside contributions from Lonnie Holley, Fox Maxy, Olen Perkins, and Eric-Paul Riege; De Boer, Los Angelese (2023), and Best Western, Santa Fe (2023). Two -person and group shows include James Fuentes, New York, (2023), Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis (2023); Marvin Gardens, New York (2023); Oakland Museum of California (2019); and ONE Archives, Los Angeles (2021). Perkins most recently served as an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Mills College.
Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.
March 28, 2024 - Words for Better Worlds: Trans Asian and Indigenous Diasporic Poets Read New Work
Please join us for a poetry reading from Dr. MT Vallarta, author of What You Refuse to Remember (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023) and f茅i hernandez, author of Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications, 2020) and (UN)DOCUMENTE (Naomi Press, 2025).
Light dinner and refreshments will be served. A Zoom livestream will be available, see QR code.
Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.
April 04, 2024 - Cintelechy Screenings
Please join us for the CINETLECHY VII screening, followed by a Q&A with maker Fox Maxy. Cinetelechy is an ongoing film series started in 2019 by Atomic Culture and Blackhorse Lowe which takes place twice a year at the Admiral Twin Drive-i and Circle Cinema, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The series observes a distinct type of filmmaker, their motivation to re-examine and re-imagine narratives, the need for self-determination; having both a personal vision and the ability to actualize that vision from within. Each screening highlights a feature length film accompanied by film trailers, shorts, and video art highlighting indigenous, local, and emerging filmmakers.
Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Pay贸mkawichum) film director and visual artist based in San Diego, California. Her first feature film, Gush, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. She is a 2022-2024 Borderlands Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School in New York City and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (CIB) at Arizona State University. In 2022 Fox was awarded the opportunity to be the Sundance Institute鈥檚 Merata Mita Fellow. In 2020, COUSIN Collective supported the director with her first grant. Fox鈥檚 work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NY, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), ImagineNative Film festival, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), BlackStar Film Festival and Lincoln Center among other places. Currently she is working on her second feature film about mental health.
Event will be held at 7:00PM at the Benton Museum of Art's Art After Hours.
April 10, 2024 - Department Fair
Please join the English department to meet professors and learn about upcoming Fall courses! Any and all majors are welcome. Refreshments will be served.
Event will be held 4pm-6pm in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.
April 11, 2024 - Untold Stories: Book Party
Come and celebrate the publication of Dr. Divita's book, Untold Stories: Legacies of Authoritarianism among Spanish Labour Migrants in Later Life by the University of Toronto Press. Untold Stories features an ethnography of a community of seniors who were born around the time of Spain's civil war (1936-1939), came of age during its repressive aftermath, and migrated to France as young adults in search of economic opportunity. Through detailed analysis of their conversational interactions, Dr. Divita shows how history lives among individuals in later life鈥攏ot as a static domain of facts and figures, but in the narrative forms that animate or haunt their everyday encounters.
David Divita, a sociocultural linguist and linguistic anthropologist, specializes in Spanish- and French-speaking people and places. His interests include the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of aging; the experience of belonging, displacement and long-term multilingualism; and the politics of history and memory-in particular as these phenomena operate among populations with national and affective attachments to contemporary Spain and France.
Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.
April 18, 2024 - 鈥楤ut Let Us In鈥: Invitations and The Old Wives鈥 Tale with Kate Bonnici
An invitation: What if we enter into a literary work and don't pick up its pieces to classify like small stones 鈥 this is this and that does that - but instead wander among the stones, which could be bones? What if we do not claim to know the exclusive purposes of what we encounter? What if we attend to how words feel when held, what they sound like when they fall? This talk will explore the ways George Peele's 1595 play The Old Wives' Tale invites such convergence between critical and creative writing, which is a space of making and unmaking, a time of re/creation.
Dr. Kate Bolton Bonnici grew up in Alabama and holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law (JD), UC Riverside (MFA), and UCLA (PhD). Her debut collection, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her second collection, A True & Just Record, was published by Boiler House Press/Beyond Criticism Editions (2023). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Maine Review, Image, Arts & Letters, Tupelo Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, CounterText, Exemplaria, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Pepperdine University.
Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.
April 25, 2024 - Music Performance by Juan & the Pines
Juan & the Pines makes traditional, inventive Americana music, adding poetic lyricism to melodies inspired by some of country and western music鈥檚 original recording stars and most beloved sounds. Classical piano lessons, the poetry and queer country music scenes on both coasts, and years spent studying languages gave Julian Talamantez Brolaski, the lead singer and songwriter, the foundation to create 鈥渟weet, cutting, and melancholy鈥 (Country Queer) country and western music. As a poet, Brolaski has released three critically acclaimed books of poems that 鈥淸push] lyric to its limits, often forcing it as close to music as it can get鈥 (Public Books).
This event will be broadcast live on KSPC 88.7fm!
This event will be helped at the Benton Museum of Art at 色中色 on April 25, 2024 from 7pm-9pm.
Galleries open until 10 pm for Art After Hours
April 26, 2024 - Senior Thesis Symposium
Join the English Department in celebrating our graduating thesis students and their accomplishments! There will be snacks and refreshments.
Event will be held at 8am-2pm in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.