READ/WRITE Series

All events are free, open to the public, and followed by a reception.
4:00 - 6:00 pm Hoffmann Lounge, Swan Hall (room 154) 60 Upper College road, Kingston RI, 02881.
Unless otherwise noted.

Spring 2010 Speakers

Press on Previous Events

Fall 2009

Spring 2009

Fall 2008

About the READ/WRITE Series

March 8, Monday - Fawzia Afzal-Khan
March 9, Tuesday - Chris Forhan, Alessandra Lynch
March 15, Monday - David Shields

Press on Previous Events

As a practitioner of literary non-fiction, Mary Cappello is primarily interested in creating forms of disruptive beauty, figuring memory in a postmodern age, bringing incompatible knowledges into the same space, and working at the borders of literary genres. Her memoir, Night Bloom (Beacon Press) is a multi-genre work that combines oral history, folklore, the bilingual journals of her Italian immigrant grandfather (a shoemaker by trade), dream-work, letters and cultural theory. Cappello's most recently published book, Awkward : A Detour (Bellevue Literary Press), a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, is a book-length essay on "awkwardness" that ranges across subjects and conditions as diverse as ontological discomfort and situational silence, immigration and stuttering, the life and work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Emily Dickinson and Henry James, "tact" and its etymological association with "touch," as well as the letters that her Italian grandfather wrote to her but never sent her when she was a child.

In her intensely personal memoir, Mary Cappello wonders aloud for us what breast cancer awareness really makes us aware of, and responds as if for the first time to the deceivingly simple command: “ tell me what you’re feeling.” Called Back looks through the lens of cancer to discover— often with humor— new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away.



Poet-essayist-translator Donald Revell
Wednesday Nov. 4th , 4:00-6:00
Lippitt Auditorium (room 402)

Donald Revell is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently of The Bitter Withy (2009) and A Thief of Strings(2007), both from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes, a PEN USA Award for Translation, and fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of four volumes of translation: Rimbaud’s The Illuminations (Omnidawn, 2009) and A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007),Apollinaire’s Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell’s critical writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye(Graywolf, 2007). He lives with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their two children in the desert south of Las Vegas and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing Director at UNLV.

All events are free, open to the public, and followed by a reception.
Lippitt Hall, Auditorium room 402, N. Quad, 5 Lippitt Road, Kingston, RI 02881

Jan Clausen & Jane Lazarre
Thursday March 5, 4-6pm
Lippitt Hall Auditorium
Co-sponsored by the Womens Studies Program.

Feminist activist Jan Clausen’s eleven books include two novels, the memoir Apples and Oranges, and five volumes of poetry. Her two most recent poetry titles, From a Glass House (IKON) and If You Like Difficulty (Harbor Mountain Press), both came out in 2007. She teaches creative writing at the New School and in the Goddard College MFA in Writing Program.

Jane Lazarre is the author of the acclaimed feminist classic, The Mother Knot, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, and Wet Earth and Dreams, a Narrative of Grief and Recovery, all published by Duke University Press, and the novels, The Powers of Charlotte (Crossing) and Worlds Beyond My Control (Dutton). She will read from her new novel, Some Place Quite Unknown, just out from Hamilton Stone editions.

D. A. Powell
March 26, 4-6pm
Hoffmann Lounge, Swan Hall

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He teaches at the University

of San Francisco and lives in the Bay Area. He w ill be reading from his recently released fourth collection, Chronic, which received a Publishers Weekly, Starred Review: that states it "is simultaneously an accessible heartbreaker, a rare gem for connoisseurs, a genre-altering breakthrough and a long anticipated follow-up.”

**Special Event URI Faculty Colloquium
Prof. Josie Campbell introduces the poetry of Prof. Gitahi Gititi
Thursday, October 16, 2008, 4-6pm

Josie Campbell is Professor of English, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature. She is also the Director of Graduate English Studies. She has published three books, ranging from medieval studies to African American studies, as well as numerous articles, including those on the drama and the novel. She is currently writing a manuscript on biography.

Gitahi Gititi is professor of English, Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, African and African Studies at URI. His literary and creative work has appeared in numerous national and international publications. He is a poet, short fiction writer, and multilingual translator. His most recent translations include Mwangi wa Mutahi's Ngoima's Story (a novel) and his Gikuyu-language poetry in Metamorphoses 2. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Our Scattered Lives, from which he will be reading a sample.

Thursday, October 23, 2008, 4-6pm
Scholar-poet-fiction writer, Prof. Dennis Barone, Saint Joseph College

Dennis Barone is a Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of three books of short fiction: Abusing the Telephone (1994), The Returns (1996), and Echoes (1997), winner of the America Award. He is also the author of two novellas, Temple of the Rat (2000) and God’s Whisper (2005). Precise Machine, a hybrid-work of memoir, prose poetry, and short fiction was recently published by Quale Press; a second mixed-genre work, North Arrow, is forthcoming in 2008. He is editor of Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), a collection of short prose pieces, The Walls of Circumstance ( 2004), and a selected poetry, Separate Objects (1998). His essays on American literature and culture have appeared in American Studies, Critique, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Voices in Italian Americana. A graduate of Bard College, he received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, and in 1992 he held the Thomas Jefferson Chair, a distinguished Fulbright lecturing award, in the Netherlands.

Thursday, November 13, 2008, 5-7pm (special time)
Poet-Prof. Mairéad Byrne, RISD
Fiction Writer-Prof. Renee Gladman, Brown University

Renee Gladman is the author of four books, most recently Newcomer Can't Swim, prose installations published by Kelsey St. Press in 2007. A new work, Toaf, is forthcoming from Atelos this fall. Gladman is editor and publisher of Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches fiction in the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Mairéad Byrne’s poetry collections include Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007), and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey Press 2003); and three chapbooks, An Educated Heart (Palm Press 2005), Vivas (Wild Honey Press 2005), and Kalends (Belladonna* 2005). She is an Associate Professor of English at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. With Mark Milloff, she hosts the monthly Providence event "couscous@tazza". Before immigrating to the United States in 1994, she was a journalist, playwright, arts centre director, and teacher in Ireland.

In the Fall of 2006, Assistant Professor Peter Covino formally stepped up to become the Director of the Read/Write series. Covino coordinated a full calendar of events for the Fall 2007 series.

Download Fall 2007 Calendar (for printing)

Download Spring 2007 Calendar (for printing)

Download Fall 2006 Calendar (for printing)

History: For decades, the URI Writers Collective, a dedicated group of faculty, graduate students, and occasionally community members, have hosted readings and workshops, organized colloquia and discussion groups relative to the literary arts, initiated a Coffee Hour for URI undergraduate English majors, (to encourage dialogue beyond the classroom), and orchestrated undergraduate and graduate readings that emerge from our Creative Writing seminars. In 2005-2006, URI English major alum and New School graduate, Penelope Cray, having returned temporarily to teach part-time at URI, formalized the Writers Collective reading series, titled it Read/Write, and co-organized the series with Professor Mary Cappello.

In its inaugural year, the Read/Write Series was designed specifically to showcase the range and depth of literary practice, talent, and expertise of per course Instructors who teach in the English Department, whose work otherwise might miss attention, as well as to continue the initiative to bring writers from across the country and abroad to read at URI. In ‘05/’06, the series featured the writers Talvikki Ansel, Matthea Harvey, Amity Gaige, Kevin Prufer, Gillian Kiley, Anna Rabinowitz, Miranda Mellis, Christina Pugh, Kate Schatz, Jason Stumpf, Tisa Bryant, Robert Leuci, Timothy Watt, Mary Angel Blount, Sam White, Jessica Gianfrocco, Craig Morgan Teicher, Matt Derby, Kathleen Hughes, and Jody Lisberger.

In years past, the Writers Collective boasted the presence on campus of acclaimed British novelist, Sarah Waters; biographer, memoirist and literary critic, Sharon O’Brien; Russian literary theorist and writer, Mikhail Epstein; Sicilian American writer and critic Edvige Giunta and filmmaker, Kym Ragusa; queer nonfiction, fiction writer, and film theorist, James Morrison; African American fiction and nonfiction writer, Thomas Glave; poet and editor of Barrow Street, Peter Covino; URI alum Norah Pollard, the poet, and daughter of the famous jockey, “Red” Pollard, and URI alum, Michael C. Keith, author of numerous books on broadcast media-radio, and the memoir, The Next Better Place, to name a few. In concert with faculty and students in Modern Languages, the Collective also sponsored multi-lingual readings in comparative literatures, and readings in tandem with art produced by faculty in URI’s Art Department.

The Writers Collective and Read/Write Series is well-known and highly regarded both within and beyond the URI community, and has gained a reputation for its encouragement of shared creativity and spirited discussion.

Funding: In 2005/06, the Read/Write Series was made possible by a hugely successful weeklong Book and Bake Sale carried out by the faculty in the English Department, and thereafter by the generous individual contributions of Professor Dorothy Donnelly, Dean Winifred Brownell, and Provost Beverly Swan. The English Department seeks to establish an Endowment for the Series, and invites Alum and other interested parties to send contributions to The URI Foundation, attn: Gerri Beagle or to Tom Zorabedian.

Contact and Further Information: For more information about the Writers' Collective, please contact Assistant Professor Peter Covino or Professor Mary Cappello.