Upcoming Events
September 25, 2024
5:30 pm, Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Brandeis Library
January Gill O'Neil is the author of Glitter Road, Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, she is a Cave Canem fellow, and currently serves as the 2022-2024 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Jan’s newest book, Glitter Road, reflects, against the backdrop of a Mississippi season, the history and legacy of Emmett Till, how his story is braided with hers, and how race binds us all together.
Krysten Hill is the 2024-2026 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University. The author of How Her Spirit Got Out, her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets and she is a recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship.
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program.
October 30, 2024
5:30 pm, Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Brandeis Library
Anne Sexton, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, was a student of Brandeis professor Alan Grossman in 1960. Born in Wellesley, Massachusetts, she was encouraged by her wealthy parents to become a socialite and housewife. She did marry and have children, living in Newton and Weston for her entire life, she also began writing poetry, and in a short decade became winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Sexton is credited as an inventor of a new kind of “confessional” poetry, which represented the breadth of human experience: from family trauma to love to mental illness to bodily pleasures. She died by suicide in 1974, after a long battle with mental illness and addiction. This event will feature scholars, family, and admirers of Anne Sexton, including Brandeis faculty and students, sharing poems by Sexton and reflections upon how, even if written from darkness, her work has served as inspiration and brought joy.
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program.