Robinson Room, Miller Library, Colby College

Ana Menéndez, the Kristina Stahl Writer-in-Residence for 2019-20, has published four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!, The Last War, Loving Che, and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the U.S. and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. As a reporter, […]

Lillian Yvonne-Bertram is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she teaches in the M.F.A. in creative writing program. Her book of computationally mediated poems, Travesty Generator, was published by Noemi Press in December 2019. Yvonne-Bertram was recently named director of the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival.

Jaed Coffin is the author of Roughhouse Friday (FSG), a memoir about the year he won the middleweight title of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. He’s also the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo), which chronicles the summer he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother’s village in Thailand. A regular contributor […]

Paul Vangelisti is the author of more than 30 books of poetry, as well as being a noted translator from Italian. In 2010 his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961-1992 won an Academy of American Poets Prize. From 1971 to 1982 he was coeditor, with John McBride, of the literary […]

Craig Santos Perez is an award-winning poet and professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. In his words, “My work is deeply influenced by Chamorro aesthetics in particular, and indigenous aesthetics in general, in which much art, architecture, weaving, tattooing, etc., employ symmetrical and repeating patterns. The same is true for many indigenous […]

Terrance Hayes is the author of six books of poetry: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry; How to Be Drawn (2015), longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry; Lighthead (2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a […]

In 1909, Clara Lemlich, a young Jewish refugee from Russia to New York City, sparked the first great women’s strike in American history by speaking uninvited to several thousand teenaged foreign-born sweatshop workers to urge a revolt against intolerable conditions. Over the next three months, Lemlich faced beatings and arrests, but the “Uprising of 20,000” […]

In honor of National Poetry Month, poet Wesley McNair will offer a recollection of his literary friendship with Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, which began in the middle 1970s, just after the two moved into their farmhouse in Wilmot, N.H. Interspersing his account with poems and personal anecdotes, McNair will show how he and his […]

Christopher Castellani is the author of three novels: All This Talk of Love (2013)—a New York Times Editors’ Choice; A Kiss from Maddalena (2003)—winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; and The Saint of Lost Things (2005)—a BookSense (IndieBound) Notable Book. His book of essays on point of view in fiction, The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, part of Graywolf’s prestigious “Art […]

A prominent scholar of Latinx performance, Dr. Noe Montez is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University. His research considers how theater, as a site of activism, can produce memory narratives that change the public's reception to governmental policies on human rights violations. […]

Arisa White, assistant professor of English, is the author of Perfect on Accident, Black Pearl, Post Pardon, A Penny Saved, and her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, which was nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Award, the 82nd California Book Awards, and the 2013 Wheatley Book Awards. Her recent collection, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, was nominated for the 29th […]

What do companion animals and money have to do with each other? Why were lapdogs and coins special objects in 18th-century narratives? What do dogs and coins tell us about love, about human affect, and even about what counts as human? Laura Brown, Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, is the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English, […]

Chen Chen, this year’s Kristina Stahl Writer in Residence, is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. […]

Chen Chen, this year’s Kristina Stahl Writer in Residence, is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. […]

Born and raised on Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, poet and performer Emily Pauline Johnson was the daughter of a Mohawk chief and his English wife. She was educated mainly at home, studying both English literature and Mohawk oral history and legend. In 1892 she was invited to give a poetry reading for the […]

This talk by Rita Felski makes a case for “attachment” as a key word for the humanities. What are the devices that attach us to works of art? Zadie Smith’s conversion to the music of Joni Mitchell offers a striking example of one such device: that of attunement. Felski is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor […]

Charles D’Ambrosio is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Lannan Fellowship and is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point and The Dead Fish Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and two essay collections, Orphans and Loitering. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at the Iowa Writers […]

Rescheduled from Tuesday, March 13 to Thursday, March 15, due to the storm expected on Tuesday. Adrian Blevins, associate professor of English at Colby, has written Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the Wilder Prize; Live from the Homesick Jamboree; The Brass Girl Brouhaha; and the chapbooks Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes. […]

In April 2016, Maine bookseller Seth Thayer, Colby Class of ’89, found a cache of medieval manuscript leaves “in a trunk in a client’s house in Maine.” A Google search investigating the leaves led him to manuscript scholar Lisa Fagin Davis, who identified all of the leaves as having been sold by the notorious mid-20th-century […]

In this talk, David Dalin, author of Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court from Brandeis to Kagan: Their Lives and Legacies, will discuss Louis D. Brandeis’s Jewish identity, views on Zionism, and leadership of the American Zionist movement. Brandeis’s distinction of having been the first Jewish Supreme Court justice is in some ways ironic because his upbringing was […]

In the space of a few hours on Oct. 23, 1947, a furious wildfire destroyed almost all of the small western Maine town of Brownfield. Neighbors fought and fled the fire, then returned, determined to rebuild their community as best they could. Drawing on interviews with townspeople, letters, photographs, and newspaper reports, storyteller Jo Radner […]

Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, Northwestern University Press, 2016) and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and […]

Colby Professor of English Debra Spark is the author of six books of fiction, including, most recently, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing and the anthology Twenty Under Thirty. Spark has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a […]

Charles D’Ambrosio will deliver this year’s Ed Kenney Memorial Reading. D’Ambrosio is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point, and The Dead Fish Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and two essay collections, Orphans and Loitering. He’s been the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Lannan Fellowship, among other honors. His work […]

Celebrate the Picher, LaVerdiere, Bernier, and Levine families, who recently donated their photo collections to Colby. Presentations by family members and Colby students will be followed by lunch. This event is the first of three organized by the Photography and Migration Project in spring 2017. Cosponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, Colby Libraries Special Collections, Office of […]