Gwen Frostic Reading Series
The Gwen Frostic Reading Series sponsored by the Department of English at Western Michigan University offers the following schedule:
spring 2020
Linda Gregerson
(Presented in partnership with The Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speaker Series)
Friday March 13, 11:00 a.m.
Knauss Hall, Room 2500
About Linda Gregerson: Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She is co-editor of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic and author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic, as well as six books of poetry and a volume of essays on contemporary American lyric. Her essays on Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wyatt, and Jonson appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Brad Leithasuer reading:
Thursday, March 19, 7:30 p.m.
Bernhard Center, Room 157-159
About Brad Leithauser: Brad Leithauser’s most recent books are The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems and a novel, The Promise of Elsewhere. His Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry is scheduled for 2021. He’s the author of seventeen books—novels, poems, essays, light verse, and a novel in verse. He is a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland for his writings about Nordic literature. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
Jennifer Blackmer
Thursday April 2, 7:30 p.m.
Knauss Hall, Room 2500
About Jennifer Blackmer: Jennifer Blackmer is the 2015 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award winner for Emerging American Playwright, and serves as Professor of Theatre and Executive Director of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry at Ball State University. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway and across the country, and include Human Terrain, Unraveled, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (Joseph Jefferson award for Best Adaptation), Delicate Particle Logic, Borrowed Babies, and the upcoming Predictor, currently in development. Jennifer’s screenplay for Human Terrain won the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award through the Tribeca Film Institute, and was also a finalist for the Sundance Film Institute Sloan Prize. Jennifer’s writing has been short-listed for the Princess Grace Award and the Shakespeare’s Sister Fellowship, and has been developed by Seven Devils, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Nashville Repertory Theatre, The Playwrights’ Center, The Lark and Activate Midwest. Jennifer is a resident playwright for Chicago's Broken Nose Theatre.