Please join us for a lunchtime reading by poet Joyelle McSweeney (1997) sharing her latest work: Toxicon and Arachne (recently reviewed in The New Yorker ) followed by a discussion with author and Kenyon Review poetry editor, David Baker and Kendra Sullivan.

Welcome and Introductions by Margot Singer (1984), Author & Professor of English, Denison University; and Julie Suk (1997), Dean for Master’s Programs & Professor of Sociology, CUNY.

Biographies

Joyelle McSweeney (Marshall Scholar 1997) has a BA from Harvard University; an MPhil in English studies from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. McSweeney’s collections of poetry include The Red Bird (2002), winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poetry Series, The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004), and Toxicon (forthcoming 2020). She is also author of the novels Nyland, the Sarcographer (2007) and Flet (2007); the prose work Salamandrine, 8 Gothics (2013); the critical volume The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014); and the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (2014), awarded the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Writers.

David Baker is author or editor of eighteen books, including most recently Swift: New and Selected Poems, published in 2019 by W. W. Norton and Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets, published in 2018. His individual poems and essays have lately appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry. His work has been awarded prizes and fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and his poetry volume Never-Ending Birds won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011. Baker holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University and for many years has served as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. For the past six years he has curated an annual eco-poetry feature, “Nature’s Nature,” for The Kenyon Review.

Margot Singer (Marshall Scholar 1984) is author of the novel Underground Fugue (2017), winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Fiction; the short story collection The Pale of Settlement (2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction; co-editor of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013). Margot is Professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

Julie Suk (Marshall Scholar 1997) is a professor of sociology, political science, and liberal Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she also serves as the academic dean overseeing the Graduate Center’s interdisciplinary master’s programs. She is the author of We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment (forthcoming in August 2020). Suk is a frequent commentator in the media on legal issues affecting women, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox, and CBS News. She has a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she studied on a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and a D.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar.

Kendra Sullivan is the director of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also acts as publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative.Her writing has appeared and is forthcoming in BOMB, F.R. DAVID, and C magazine. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY; The Bureau for Open Culture at MASS MoCA; and The Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University. Her curatorial projects include: Sea Worthy (2011), Ed Sanders: Seeking the Glyph (2015), Accompaniment (2015), and Resistance After Nature (2017). She has performed her own works at the Banff Centre, Alberta; Dexter Sinister, NY; and tenletters, Glasgow; and as part of Robert Ashley’s The Trail of Anne Opie Wehrer at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and at 356 Mission in 2016. She is a member of the eco-art collective Mare Liberum and co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a community space for art and politics run out of a stopped-in-time diner in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

We are grateful to our partners, speakers and all participants for sharing support and solace during this global health crisis. This is the first in a series of Marshall Arts & Humanities online events to connect and inspire us over this difficult spring and early summer months.

Co-Sponsors:

Nightboat Books

Denison University / Beck Series

The Graduate Center/CUNY

• The Center for the Humanities

• The PhD Program in English

• Office of the Dean for Master’s Programs

• The M.A. Program in Biography and Memoir

• Program in Irish Studies at Queens College, CUNY

Notre Dame University English Department