2017 G37 Summit of Poetry, Sicily

A panoramic view of Caltagirone

A few months ago I received an unexpected but wonderful invitation to participate in the G37 Summit of Poetry (Summit della Poesia), "La Potenza della Conscenza." This poetry gathering aimed to bring together established writers from several of the G7 countries, including established and apprentice Italian poets, to share their work in venues near where the G7 participants were planning to convene in Taormina, Sicily in late May. Of course I said yes. The dates, May 25-27, fortunately fell after the last of my domestic readings and Commencement, and did not conflict with any other commitments, and having visited Caltagirone, Sicily for a poetry festival at the end of 2009, I figured the trip and the festival would be nothing short of remarkable. Having now returned to the States, I can say without hesitation that once again, the Sicilians did not disappoint! The hospitality, warmth, kindness, generosity, and attentiveness of our Sicilian hosts was superlative at every point during the trip, and though I have traveled a little bit around the world, never have I been treated as well as I have when in Sicily. To everyone who made the festival and our visit possible, milione grazie!

In the Labyrinth of Ariadne
(Gianfranco Molino near the entrance)

The brainchild of Sicilian native Antonio Presti, a major figure in contemporary Sicilian and Italian art, and the director of the Fondazione Antonio Presti Fiumara d'Arte, based in the exquisite little seaside town of Castel di Tusa, and managed expertly by Josephine Pace, a brilliant poet, businesswoman and Caltagirone native, the G37 Summit of Poetry represented both a complement and counter-force to the gathering of political power on display just down the road in Taormina. Alongside the demonstrable power embodied by the presence of the world's most powerful politicians, who included US President Donald Trump, the G37 organizers envisioned a festival that promoted and reinforced "The Power of Knowledge," which would include international voices and those from cities and towns across Sicily, Italy, and the globe.

The Tyrrhenian Sea at sunset

To quote some of the event literature (and I'm hewing here to the translated English in the original documents): "The Foundation Antonio Presti Fiumara d'Arte intends to activate...a big 'word's event' to reach people's hearts, touch their roots, reawaken their humanity that sometimes [asleep], graying because of the mediocrity" of our time. Rather than viewing the G37 Summit as a "snub" to the G7, the Foundation suggested that it wanted "to be a mantra, a subtle pervasive melody that direct[s] people differently looking upon this earth...of which Sicily, with its contradictions, is a perfect synthesis." The poetry summit was, therefore, intended to be a living poem, that would

affirm the superiority of the principle of Beauty than that of finance and economics. The real aim is promote a collective thinking: economic power is subject to the power of knowledge. To be free, men and women need to nourish by knowledge.

At the Birch Forest
reading, Mt. Etna
(photo by C)

Central to G37 Summit's theme was the dynamic assembly of the collective knowledge and wisdom, the artistic power, of poets, writers, and artists of all kinds, speaking to locals and visitors, and sharing words that might carry beyond Mt. Etna's slopes and the baroque churches where the readings took place. The idea of investing words with such power, or believing that they could possess such power once more, underscored not just a profound faith in literature and art, but also a recognition of Sicily's ancient past, and language's sacred, spiritual, metaphysical and psychological potency. Reading poems in the open air, amidst the spectacular Bosca di Betulle, or Birch Forest, one of the rare stands of birch so far south in Europe and uniquely from Mt. Etna's black, volcanic soil, as well as in the historic small-town churches, the poets and musicians, would underline what the Foundation saw as a clear message, "the value of being as opposed to the logic of having." Or, as I saw it, the power of language's presence, in and of itself, its capacity to bring reality into being and to shape it, as well as its resistance, however small, to the commodifying machinery of global neoliberalism.

The high-school age student participants wrote poems based on the theme of "knowledge." Their teachers then selected some of these poets to read during the two day-long sessions at the Birch Forest on Mt. Etna. The students would thus, to quote the Foundation, become "not only passive receptors of the poetic Word but, through a prior preparation of the school, first-person protagonists of the expressive modes." They would also be active members of the audience for the published poets, and one of the highlights for me was meeting some of the young poets and their classmates, particularly those who were studying English, as well as those who were immigrants and refugees. One, Ibrahim, who introduced himself to C and me, mentioned that he was living in one of the local towns, but was originally from Gambia, and thanked me for my poem in English. I spoke briefly with a few others before taking a few selfies (which may be floating around Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites, though I haven't seen them). A third component of their participation entailed collaboratively producing "ethical manifestos." These texts would provide "essential theoretical, moral and ontological support" for their poetry, their lives, and their futures.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Caltagirone

Before we headed to eastern Sicily, however, we had breakfast at a hotel along Palermo's sea coast, then headed through the center of Sicily, via the picturesque, elevated town of Enna, to Caltagirone, where we had the pleasure of spending a little time with our dear friends Josephine and Gaetano, their daughter Giulia, Josephine's sister Miriam, and her husband, Dino, her adorable new baby, their parents, and other members of her family and friends. Caltagirone looked exactly as it had last time, and those famous stairs were no less difficult to ascend, though we did it several times. We also got to tour Josephine's family factory, which was humming and a work of art in itself; she and her sister truly merge the worlds of business and art. I also participated in the first of several interviews, this one with a local bureau of RAI, the major Italian media company, and though I have not seen it, I think it went well. Josephine translated fluidly and swiftly, I thought, my pedestrian English into the approximate, melodious Italian. Trump's name and policies surfaced during this interview and others, and all throughout the trip. At one point, when I discussed his tenure without mentioning his name, an interviewer asked me specifically to say "Trump." They wanted me to put him on the record.

On TV, with Josephine, in Caltagirone
(Photo by C)

After our stay in Caltagirone, we headed the next day to Savoca, where the first of the readings took place that evening in the Mother Church Santa Maria of the Assumption into Heaven. This was my first opportunity to meet most of the other poets, which was another of the great pleasures of the trip, as were the stunning mountainous landscapes, which wound down to the rocky coasts, in Roccalumera and Castel di Tusa, skirting the Tyrrhenian Sea. As some of the photos make clear, these truly were mountains and not merely hills, and looming amidst all of them was the still active Mt. Etna. In fact on the way to one of the other cities, we could even smell the volcano's almost suffocating sulfur as we sped through a tunnel. The Sicilians' gift for navigating the hilly roads impressed me yet again. Thankfully, though they drive very fast, they were also skillful at navigating the flat(er) highways and tunnels.

In Enna

Before I say more about the events, let me list the participating poets, some of whom joined only one or two of the readings, though all of the poets from outside Italy read at every venue. The poet participants included: Antonella Anedda, Alessio Arena (a very pleasant young poet from Palermo, I believe I heard someone say), Maria Attanasio (one of Sicily's great living writers, whom I met when she passed through Chicago years ago, and who it was a joy to see again, along with her fun husband Gianni), Mariano Baino, Michaël Batalla (from France, and we got to meet his lovely wife, Virginie, a filmmaker), Alberto Bertoni, Elisa Biagini (who had received her doctorate in the US and translated American and Anglophone poets), Tiziano Broggiato, Sebastiano Burgaretta (whom we met during our previous visit in 2009), Tiziana Cera Rosco (a poet living in Milan, who with her boyfriend Ted, originally from Canada, became our traveling companions, especially towards the end of the visit), Giuseppe Condorelli, Giuseppe Conte, Gianni D'Elia, Antonio Di Maura, and Flavio Ermini.

Walking toward the Pyramid

Also reading were Giovanni Fontana, Biancamaria Frabotta, Gabriele Frasca, Mariangela Gualtieri, Biagio Guerrera (a friendly poet whose work drew from Sicily's rich linguistic traditions, who spoke excellent English, and who was my cue to approach the stage, as I often missed the detailed Italian instructions about reading order), Andrea Inglese (another talented younger poet who'd taught in Paris), Vivian Lamarque, Paolo Lisi, Rosaria Lo Russa (a Milanese poet we'd met in 2009), Roberto Mussapi (who we got to chat with towards the end of the trip), Luigi Nacci, Aldo Nove, Carmelo Panebianco, Antonio Riccardi, Margherita Rimi, Cia Rinne (a Swedish-German-Danish poet remarkably fluent in multiple languages, and the author of poems that ranged with playful swiftness between them), Evelina Schatz (a wonderful Russian-Italian poet who read in both languages), Marco Simonelli (another young Milanese poet), Ida Travi, Patrizia Valduga, and Sara Ventroni.

C in one of the rooms at the Museo Hotel
Atelier sul Mare, Castel di Tusa, La Stanza
della Luce, designed by Pepi Morgia

Moreover, others who played important roles, in addition to the poets, Antonio Presti, and Josephine Pace, were the kind, indefatigable Gianfranco Molino, of the Foundation; other members of the foundation (including Giovanni--a painter, with whom I spoke about his work in my very broken Italian), Adriana La Porta, Josephine's thoughtful colleague; Alessandra Caccioppo; Elisabetta Raffa; Carmelo Damico; Antonio Musumeci; Lorenzo Di Silvestro; the Polyphonic Choruses of Castiglione and Linguaglossa; Alfio Priolo; the students of the ITS Steve Jobs in Caltagirone; the various curates of the churches where we read; the caribinieri and rangers in the Birch Forest on Mt. Etna; all of the others who ran the video equipment, answered questions, kept us on schedule, drove us around, and just provided a continuous welcome; and whoever translated my poems, which occurred with great speed and for which I offer my deep gratitude! I know I am leaving out other important people, so my apologies, and to all of you, thanks so very much for everything!

Savoca

Returning to the events, on May 26 and 27, we read with the students from the morning through the late afternoon in the Birch Forest, in Piedimonte Etneo (literally the foot of Mt. Etna). In honor of the birches, we were urged to wear white, which gave me an opportunity to 1) sport a pair of white jeans I hadn't worn since last year but thankfully could still fit and 2) buy a white pullover in Caltagirone. Each of the two Mt. Etna readings opened with a ritual procession, led by Carmine Elisa Moschella, pictured in the video below, singing and descending into the valley where the main event occurred, followed by performers who would go on to wrap the birches very slowly, rhythmically really, as the speeches unfolded. At every event Antonio Presti would provide an overview of the festival and share his thoughts on the importance of what we were doing.


In addition to Carmine's songs, musician Michele LaPaglia improvisationally and impressionistically accompanied the poetry readings--unless poets asked him not to--using a series of percussion and wind instruments. He concluded both of the Birch Forest events in conjunction with audience members who were equipped with brightly colored plastic tubes that doubled as whistles, issuing ethereal tones in response to Michele's. Between the ritual opening and the closing music, established and student poets, whom Antonio Presti introduced and often posed questions to, read for roughly 3 minutes each. Nearly all the poets adhered to these guidelines. Michele performed with the poets at the church readings too, and I am still amazed at how he often found an appropriate accompaniment to the work each of us read. (I did ask him to produce a darker tone for my poem "Words," which is a litany about mis-understanding as reality.)

Salvatore Comodo, one of two
Italian politicians we met

In addition to LaPaglia and Moschella, May 26's Mt. Etna reading featured also featured Daniela Motta, with students from Guttuso Art Institute, the Mazzei-Sabin Agrarian Institute of Giarre (a nearby town), and the Steve Jobs Institute of Caltagirone. The May 27 Mt. Etna reading included LaPaglia, Moschella and Motta, the students from the Guttuso Art Institute and the Steve Jobs Institute of Caltagirone, and students from the Classical Grammar School of Giarre, the Linguaglossa Amari Linguistic and Linguistic Grammar School, and the Amaryllus Lyceum of Riposto. On the first day on Mt. Etna, in Linguaglossa, the Etruscan Piedimonte, after the reading concluded, C and I hiked with a number of poets and their partners and friends to the Rifugio Soggiorno, or food campsite, and I want to thank Dr. Wayne Winnick yet again for helping get my knees into shape to do this. (I could not imagine what this would have been like had they not be able to take the long, twisting, ascending march over the volcanic soil.) It was a workout but an enjoyable one.

Black cats, poolside, in Palermo

At the refugio the lunch was simple but delicious, but then I can state unequivocally that I did not have a bad meal the entire time I was in Sicily. At both the lunches and the dinners, things unfolded as multiple courses, so there were sandwiches, then salad, then meats (if you ate them), all accompanied by what we initially thought was grape juice given the plastic jugs that contained the dark violet liquid, but which turned out to be delicious locally produced red wine. I had the delightful opportunity that day to meet a number of college students from Palermo, and we worked on collaborative poems and discussed poetry, which was a lot of fun. (And took selfies!) The second day we joined Josephine, Gaetano, Evelina, and Rosaria at a nearby local restaurant, where the food was, unsurprisingly, perfect. (I had pasta with a sauce that combined fennel, pine nuts, and anchovies, and the chef pulled it off.) My favorite meal was a Sicilian specialty, the summery pasta with lemon, which was, I learned more a little lemon-lime (verdetto). I'll have to learn how to make this over here.

Poet Cia Rinne, reading
her work

On the evenings of both days that we visited Mt. Etna, we read in churches, as on Thursday evening. On May 26, we read in the municipality of Castiglione di Sicilia, at the Basilica Madonna of the Chain. The Polyphonic Choir Mater Catenae of Castiglione, the New Book Club of Palermo, and musician Antonella Furian all took part. There was also a video installation by Daniela Motta at this event and the subsequent evening one. The following night we read in the municipality of Linguaglossa, in the Mother Church Santa Maria of Grace near the downtown square. This event involved a tribute to the beloved Sicilian poet Santo Cali, read by an amazing performer, Agostino Zumbo, whom I could not understand but whose passion certainly transcended linguistic barriers. Also participating were the Choir and Orchestra of Linguaglossa, and the Linguistic Lyceum. The student musicians, like the professional ones, played with skill and verve.

The church where we read
 in Linguaglossa

We had dinners, in the Italian style, i.e. beginning at 8:30-9 pm, involving multiple courses, and running until 11 or later, at various spots. In Savoca, we ate at a (former?) monastery (I think), and each of the poets, I included, inscribed poems in concrete blocks which will eventually be placed at a new project that the Foundation is developing. The second, quite chilly evening, we dined at a winery--cantina--where we met a local politician, Salvatore Comodo--though he didn't exactly introduce himself as such--who had, he shared with us, just sat earlier that day in the ancient Greek theater in Taormina right behind none other than Trump and the First Lady. (At the multicourse, outdoor meal at this venue, I did encounter a meat whose origins I could not identify--and as a mostly-vegetarian (pescatarian?), I sampled only a tiny bit of it, but it was quite tasty.) For the readings I chose to read no more than two poems, one usually very short and the other no longer than a page, at each reading. I also chose poems that I felt were appropriate to the occasion, and public in spirit and tone. All of these events brought out healthy crowds--and everyone who drove up those vertiginous, serpentine roads to reach the readings on Mt. Etna deserve a medal--and some members of the audience were conversant enough in English to offer comments and thoughts on my English poems and, I imagine, the poems they heard in French and German.

The student poets before one of the
readings in Piedimonte Etneo

After we left Linguaglossa, Antonio Zinga drove us to Castel di Tusa, Messina, where we stayed in the extraordinary--and that is putting it mildly--Museum Hotel (a/k/a Atelier sul Mare Museo Albergo) Castel di Tusa--which is literally, not just figuratively, a hotel that not only holds numerous works of art, but also is also a work of art itself. And I mean its rooms are art installations, some so fully so that they were truly conceptual in design and function. I include photos below and on the next page. In Castel di Tusa, we were right on the sea, but we took a walking tour of the town, which rose ladderlike via steeply ramped streets. During our outing we spotted bodyguards and glimpsed a person we figured must be a famous person having lunch not far from us, and after a bit of Googling we realized after he had left that it was the President of Sicily, Rosario Crocetta. We thought about asking him for a photo, but decided we probably shouldn't bother him. The next day, at a completely different restaurant, while having a leisurely early lunch (before a second lunch at the hotel!), we ran into this same gentleman, and this time we asked for and took a photo with him, which is below. 

C, the President of Sicily, and yours truly

That day we also visited a number of the giant sculptures that the Foundation had erected near Castel di Tusa, including the almost indescribable giant Pyramid/38° Parallel, which sits high atop a mountain and which will, in a few weeks, be the site of a solstice festival. To reach the Pyramid, whose latitude is exactly that of the line dividing North and South Korea, and which you can spot from many vantages far below, you must drive up a dizzyingly circuitous road--though there is also a cow--or goat?--path that you can climb to reach it--then park, and walk up towards the triangular structure, which you then enter via a pitch-black tunnel, proceeding slowly until you come upon stone stairs that take you up into the mostly dark giant structure itself, which has a stone labyrinth inside it, and which only a thin opening illuminates. We visited it with Antonio Presti, Gianfranco, Tiziana, Ted, and a young journalist whose name escapes me, and I have to admit that at one point, as we stood near the edge of the cliff, I could feel vertigo slowly creeping inside me, though the sublime sunset over the sea helped to subdue my anxiety about the cliffs. In addition to the Pyramid, we also walked the Labyrinth of Ariadne (Labirinto di Ariana), which provided another unexpected but exhilarating workout. At its center was a tree: the Tree of Life.

The mountainside towns
near Mt. Etna

We said goodbye to Castel di Tusa and Sicily one week after we arrived, riding back to Palermo early in the morning courtesy of Gianfranco, who gave us a verbal tour as we headed northwest via Sicily's beautiful--and that hour, mostly empty--highways. The return via Palermo Airport involved far less hassle than I usually encounter in US airports, and though it felt great to land at JFK, I immediately felt a pang of wistfulness because we had such an incredible time in Sicily. I also would return in a heartbeat. To repeat my thanks from my first paragraph, the hospitality, warmth, kindness, generosity, and attentiveness of our Sicilian hosts was superlative at every point during the trip, and once again, though I have little bit around the world, never have I been treated as well as I have when in Sicily. To everyone who made our visit possible, MILIONE GRAZIE A TUTTI!

(More photos in the next post!)

Random Photos

A sampling of photos from April and May, two incredibly busy months!

"1612 Dots," a participatory, conceptual
 sculpture in Brookfield Place,
World Trade Center

Geese and goslings, Jersey City

The flyer for A Stray, a superb film
by one of my Rutgers-Newark MFA
advisees, filmmaker and fiction writer
Musa Syeed

Musa introducing his film, A Stray

At the Montclair Literary Festival (l-r: Sam Lipsyte
Garth Risk Hallberg & Nicholas Delbanco),
with our host introducing the event, The Sanctuary at First 

Elena Delbanco at the Montclair Literary Festival

Cleaning the pedestrian walkway,
mall in downtown Jersey City

One of my brilliant honors undergraduate
students, Madani Sheikh, presenting his
work at the Rutgers-Newark Student Research Fair

My other honors undergraduate
student, Secilia Flores, presenting her
work at the Rutgers-Newark Student Research Fair

A mural underway, Jersey City

Colm Toibín, and my colleagues MFA program
director Jayne Anne Phillips and Brenda
Shaughnessy, Writers @ Newark reading series

The packed house for the Writers @ Newark reading

David Hyde Pierce signing autographs
outside Hello, Dolly! on Broadway

Lower Manhattan, infogged (befogged?)

Newark doorway

My brilliant former student Serena Lin,
reading at her farewell event (before moving
back West), in Brooklyn

Pondering pigeon

A truly gifted author, poet and fiction writer
Jeffery Renard Allen, with whom I read
this year's MELUS conference, at a panel
organized by Keith Byerman

MIT's postmodern and avant-garde
Stata Center

A discarded twist brush, which was sitting
right in front of my building at
Rutgers-Newark

Lincoln, Illinois

10th Annual Writers' Festival at Northwestern

Remove the "10 Annual" portion of this blog post's title, and this could appear to be one of several I wrote during my decade at Northwestern University, including the one marking the fifth annual festival, my last while there, in 2012. In fact, I was there for the festival's creation in 2007. The Annual Writers' Festival arose from a desire to convene during one week and place in conversation distinguished authors from the three major creative genres, poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, that we were teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. When I first taught at NU, each quarter roughly brought a visiting writer from a different genre. The major visiting writer to participate on his own as the undergraduate creative writing guest before the festival began was Junot Díaz, I believe, in the fall of 2007, right after his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was published, and just before it received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. 

Cathy Park Hong reading her work

Bringing the visiting writers and literary events together meant that the students would be able to interact with them at the same time, and see them interact with each other. It also ensured maximization of our--faculty, staff, and student--resources. The festivals turned out to be a great success, and I can still remember some of the events as if they had occurred yesterday. Because of them, I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Brigit Pegeen Kelly read before she passed away; observing George Saunders warmly share his bounty of wisdom with student; watching Nami Mun thrill a room of student writers; feeling my pique soar as David Shields threw down the gauntlet about fiction's supposed irrelevance; and immersing myself in ZZ Packer's novel-in-progress.

Sasha Hemon at his craft talk

It was thus a profound surprise and deep honor to be invited as one of this year's guests, along with two excellent writers, poet and critic Cathy Park Hong and fiction and nonfiction writer Aleksander (Sasha) Hemon, to participate in the tenth version of the festival. Returning for the festival meant that I would have the opportunity to see many former colleagues, creative writers, scholars and staff members, and also be in dialogue with and listen to Cathy and Sasha offer their thoughts and share their work. Since I knew how the schedule unfolded, I knew that I would need to read and be ready to discuss the work of the student writers, prepare a craft talk (on the novella, I decided, since the undergraduate fiction majors and minors were in the midst of writing them), be ready for a guided conversation, and give a reading.

Cathy talking about speculative poetics

Each of these turned out to be very enjoyable, and given that our festival ran concurrently with a scholarly conference--I even ran into one of its speakers, Philip Brian Harper, who teaches at NYU, twice while there!--and a reading that brought Zadie Smith to campus the same evening as my reading, the strong student and faculty attendance and participation were even more heartening. Some highlights for me were meeting the graduate and undergraduate students, seeing and hanging out with my former coworkers, taking notes as Cathy theorized and discussed what she described as "Speculative Poetics," and hearing Sasha read a powerful nonfiction piece spurred by the election of Donald Trump. It also felt uncanny at times to be walking around Evanston (and to be in O'Hare Airport, the scene of so many waking nightmares), which I had not set foot in five years but felt like I'd only been away from for a week at most. (I did get to see my cousin Raquel, her husband Walter, and their two adorable cats, so that was an added bonus of being back there.)

A clip from Cathy's talk, featuring a performance
by Latasha Natasha Nevada Diggs

I owe a debt of gratitude and offer my thanks to the English Department Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing, and all the other festival sponsors. (Thanks to the Evanston Literary Festival, which also listed our events.) Thanks to Jennifer, Averill, Brian, Eula, John, Juan, Rachel, Shauna, Rachel, and Reg, and everyone else who made the festival possible. Thanks also to Cathy and Sasha for their work and fellowship. I really appreciated getting an opportunity to meet and discuss writing by Tara, Sophie, Zoë, Mackenzie, Danny, and Troy. In addition, it was such a pleasure to also see Susannah, Brian, Helen, Harris, and Andrew, and to run into Jay, Jeff and Kate (who were leaving a dinner with...Phil Harper!). It was a great capstone to a long, full semester, and the best way to see Chicago again after a while away.

Here's a write-up by Maddie Burakoff in Northwestern's student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern. Chicago Magazine also picked the Writers Festival as the top arts and cultural event to do that week!

I was so involved I barely took pictures, so the ones above and below are the best of the lot.

One of our post-event dinners, in Evanston

A find, from one of Evanston's used
bookstores

Leafy, shady Evanston

2017 Rutgers-Newark Commencement

Some of our MFA students before the Graduate
Hooding. I had the immense pleasure of having nearly
all of them in a workshop or literature class! 

It has been eons since I've blogged, I know, but this year so far has easily been my busiest in a while, perhaps ever. I've recited the litany so often I think friends and associates, and most certainly my colleagues, are tired of hearing it, but in addition to my departmental chair duties, teaching, mentoring graduate students (3 MFAs, 1 independent study, 1 TA, two different doctoral committees), undergraduates (2 honors students), multiple search committees, and university committees, as well as various non-university profession-related duties, I also spent a good portion of the semester traveling to continue promoting Counternarratives and my other books, and while I love doing so, the physical and psychic toll of travel, especially these days, is always steeper than I envision.

As the scant entries this year testify, my blogging has especially fallen by the wayside this year. This  saddens me because I enjoy writing on here, and I feel like there's a particular need for it now. (I can also recall how just a few years ago, we were told that Twitter was becoming irrelevant and that blogging would soon be joining the ranks of the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth.) My several entries on the current resident of the White House remain stubs, however, and every day--sometimes it feels like every hour--brings so many new political revelations, bombshells, and shocks that, as was the case during the George W. Bush years, if you miss a week, you might as well wait for the next cluster of horrors and outrages. I think you can reasonably describe the White House's attempted Muslim Bans, its health care bills, its assault on regulations, its draconian budget, and so on horrors and outrages, even for some of Donald Trump's supporters....

But my aim with this entry was not to talk about Trump, but rather to congratulate the Rutgers-Newark (and Rutgers more broadly) Classes of 2017, undergraduate and graduate, and by extension, all who graduated this spring and year.  I'm very glad the semester and academic year have come to a close, but I already miss the students I worked with this year. As I mentioned, I supervised three MFA fiction students, Soili Smith, Matt Weir (whom I'd taught when he was a beginning creative writing student at Northwestern!) and Magally "Maggie" Zelaya, all of whom successfully completed their theses this spring. In addition, Soili applied and was admitted to Rutgers-Newark's PhD program in American Studies.

I also supervised two honors undergraduate students, both of whom successfully submitted fiction theses, Secilia Flores and Madani Sheikh. Madani graduated summa cum laude, received a senior prize from the English department, and gained admission into Rutgers-Newark's MFA program. He even was recently the subject of a thoughtful profile on Rutgers-Newark's website, and had previously received coverage as part of a social entrepeneurship team that made it to the regional finalist stage when he was a freshman.

All of these students, as well as others I mentored and taught, were a joy to work with, and I will definitely miss them, though I'll get to see Soili and Madani this upcoming academic year. Congratulations to all of them and all of this year's graduates!

Below are a few photos from Rutgers-Newark's various end-of-the-academic-year and Commencement events. For the Graduate Hooding ceremony and the actual Prudential Center campus-wide commencement, I wore a purple robe (for my graduate degree from NYU), but a creative writing colleague told me that I need to get the fancier, final degree model, with the fancier hat. Will do!

The big shebang, at the Prudential Center! 

Yours truly, one of our talented MFA graduates,
Darise Jean-Baptiste, and my wonderful
colleague Tayari Jones, after Commencement

The MFA graduates, during their end-of-year
reading at the MFA house

Matt Weir, one of my MFA advisees,
reading from his hilarious thesis

Poet Jeremy Clark, with Matt at right 

Darise Jean-Baptiste, reading from
her fiction thesis

Leslie Jones, reading from her
fiction thesis--well, showing its cover
before reading from it 

Maggie Zelaya, sharing her cover before
reading from her thesis, which I saw take
shape over her time at Rutgers-Newark

Aarthi Monteiro, another student I finally
got to work with last fall, reading from
her fiction thesis

Soili Smith, one of my MFA advisees,
reading from her fiction thesis, Sasquatch,
which did not include the story featuring Sasquatch
(though I hope the full collection will)

Students in the book arts course,
with their art-text projects, which they
discussed before sharing a bit of work

The faculty and students listening to the readings

Faculty and students enjoying the readings

Tyehimba Jess, Colson Whitehead Win Pulitzer Prizes

Tyehimba Jess

CONGRATULATIONS to poet and friend Tyehimba Jess, who was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his new collection Olio (Wave Press)! Winner of numerous awards, including a Whiting Foundation fellowship, Jess is a fellow NYU graduate and graduate fellow of Cave Canem. He is an associate professor at the CUNY College of Staten Island. His collection, for which he developed a new poetic form, the syncopated sonnet, explores the lives of a cavalcade of key 19th century African American artists and performers, many clustered around the minstrel tradition. The title, "Olio," is in fact a term for the variety acts in a minstrel show, a component of such performances that carried over into Vaudeville and burlesque. Jess's collection manages to be both formally and visually innovative, and historically and culturally humanizing, and underlines his standing as one of the major poets writing today.

Congratulations also to fiction writer Colson Whitehead, who received this year's Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel The Underground Railroad (Doubleday), which I am teaching this spring in my undergraduate literature class on history and myth in contemporary African Diasporic fiction. Whitehead's novel takes the concept of the Underground Railroad and transforms it, using the speculative mode, into a narrative that manages both to capture the essence of the fugitive system and  signify on a range of ideological nodes in US history, including state-sanctioned white supremacy, Progressive-era eugenicism, and precarious liberalism's inability to safeguard black life. Throughout Whitehead's skill, at every level of his prose, gleams, and his protagonist, Cora, as well as numerous minor figures, are not easily forgotten.

Colson Whitehead

Other winners this year in the arts and letters category include Lynn Nottage in the Drama category for her play Sweat; Heather Ann Thompson in the history category for her study Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon); Hisham Matar in the Biography category for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House); Matthew Desmond, in the General Nonfiction category, for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown); and composer Yu Dun, in the music category, for Angel's Bone, a multimedia opera. In the news category, Hilton Als received a Pulitzer in Criticism for his reviews in The New Yorker.

Lynn Nottage

I may be wrong, but I believe this is the most Black--4!--Pulitzer Prize winners ever, and the most ever received by authors and journalists of color. I guess we'll see if this is but a temporary shift or a harbinger of the future. (One of the oddest selections, though, was Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter and spinner of tissues of fantasy, in the Commentary selection. Perhaps this was supposed to reflect balance of some sort, but having read several of Noonan's columns this past year, I remain no less baffled than when I first heard the news.)

Noonan included, congratulations again to all this year's recipients, and please go out and buy of a copy of Olio, The Underground Railroad, and any of Als's books, and, before it closes and if you're in New York, catch Sweat! (I still have to myself.)