4/11/2022 COVID Update: The State of Maine no longer requires masking or proof of vaccination to attend any public events, but individual venues are free to do so. For the latest information, visit the Center for Disease Control and Prevention or the State of Maine’s COVID site.
- This event has passed.
2 Cent Talks: Phuc Tran and Kristen Case
September 21, 2021, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Free2 Cent Talks - Celebrating the verbal arts in Maine.
Phuc Tran has been a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. Tran graduated Bard College in 1995 with a BA in Classics and received the Callanan Classics Prize. He taught Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in New York at the Collegiate School and was an instructor at Brooklyn College’s Summer Latin Institute. Most recently, he taught Latin, Greek, and German at the Waynflete School in Portland, Maine. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour. He has also been an occasional guest on Maine Public Radio, discussing grammar; the Classics; and Strunk and White’s legacy. He currently tattoos at and owns Tsunami Tattoo in Portland, Maine, where he lives with his family. Phuc is the author of the memoir Sigh, Gone.
Kristen Case teaches courses in American literature, environmental writing, and the intersection of 20th- and 21st-century American literature and philosophy. She has published essays on Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William James, and is the author of the book American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). She is co-editor of the volumes Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments (Cambridge UP, 2016) and 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th Century Archive (Milkweed Editions, 2019). Kristen’s first poetry collection, Little Arias was published by New Issues Press in 2015. Her second collection, Principles of Economics, published by Switchback Books, won the 2018 Gatewood Prize. She is the recipient of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry (2016 and 2020), a MacDowell Fellowship, and the UMF Trustee Professorship. She is co-Director of the New Commons Project, a public humanities initiative sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, and Director of Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau.
Sponsored by Colby College’s Office of the President, Center for the Arts and the Humanities, English Department, and Creative Writing Program.