Beijing-based journalist for "Science" - October 6

October 6, a lunch talk with Mara Hvistendahl, supported by the Maury Povich Fund for Journalism Programs, 11:30 AM in the Arts Cafe.

Mara Hvistendahl is a Beijing-based correspondent for Science. Her first book, Unnatural Selection, is a captivating and at turns sinister technological history that examines not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies underlying sex selection but also the West's role in creating them. Her award-winning writing has also appeared in Harper's, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy. Proficient in both Spanish and Chinese, she has spent half of the past decade in China, where she has reported on everything from archaeology to the space program. A former contributing editor at Seed magazine and journalism professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, Hvistendahl sits on the advisory board of Round Earth Media, an organization founded to promote international journalism.

lunchtime seminar on pastoral

“PASTORAL ORIGINS,” A CONVERSATION WITH ANNIE SEATON

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: email wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM

Since Theocritus, the pastoral has been about origin, loss, and difference. This stands against the cliched image of the pastoral as idealized nature scenes of frolicking, hyper-sexual shepherds. In fact, those cliches, along with the dryly canonical nature of much of the secondary literature on the pastoral, have encouraged the neglect of some important and interesting themes. Quietly influential, the pastoral affect is, in fact, one of the dominant cultural modes by which the West represents itself — and it may even, in fact, be one of the earliest sources of the mythopoetic fashioning of cultural nationalism, considered broadly. This talk will consider passages from Theocritus to Heidegger, to read the pastoral as a search for lost origins vs. a clash with "difference." After a brief introductory talk by Annie Seaton, participants will be invited to consider and discuss passages.

Ann Seaton worked with Mary Lefkowitz and Frank Bidart at Wellesley, where she was a two-time undergraduate Academy of American Poets Prize winner and a Mellon Fellow. At Harvard, she studied American, French, and English literature and literary theory with Barbara Johnson. Subsequently, Annie was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown, and has taught at Skidmore, CUNY, and Bard College, where she is presently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. Annie is working on a book-length project, Pastoral Origins. Her main interests are in Ancient Greek, English Renaissance, French 18th and 19th century, and American 18th-20th century literature.

Susan Schultz visits the Writers House

On Wednesday, September 14, join us for a poetry reading given by Susan Schultz. It begins at 6 PM. Susan M. Schultz teaches at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She has edited Tinfish Press, which publishes experimental poetry from the Pacific, since 1995. Among her books of poems and poetic prose is Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press, 2008). She is also the author of A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 2005), and of the Tinfish Editor's Blog, among other work. Susan will be spending the better part of a week with us, while she begins her sabbatical leave from teaching and makes her way from poetry spot to poetry spot on the US mainland. Susan Schultz's book, Dementia Blog, is an innovative look at the way memory works and, at once, a memoir of her mother's struggles with Alzheimer's Disease. An episode of PoemTalk was devoted to that work. Please listen.