The Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma is featuring an exhibit about women’s suffrage, “Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes.” The exhibit runs through September 27, and here is a link to more information:
http://www.washingtonhistory.org/wshm/featuredexhibits/womensvotes.aspx
A recent (2008) CD from Blues legend B.B. King is One Kind Favor (Geffen Records). Songs on the CD include “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” “The World Gone Wrong,” “Midnight Blues,” “Backwater Blues,” and “How Many More.”
Among the numerous books written or edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has been in the news lately, is Africana: The Encyclopedia of The African and African-American Experience. This book from 2003 is The Concise Desk Reference version of the longer 1999 edition, but in spite of its being concise (and compact), it’s still over a thousand pages long. The immensely useful reference-work is published by The Running Press in Philadelphia. Professor Gates edited the volume with Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah.
There is a relatively new (2007) and expanded edition of the venerable Poetry Speaks from Sourcebooks/Media Fusion. The big book includes poems by and biographical overviews of a wide variety of poets, chiefly from the 20th century, including Eliot, Frost, Auden, Tolson, Hughes (both Langston and Ted), Levertov, Roethke, Ginsberg, Plath, Stein, Millay, Jeffers, Pound, Graves, Bogan, Parker, H.D., Sandburg, and Stevens. In all, the work of 47 poets is represented, as is each poet’s recorded reading of at least one poem and often two, for a total of 107 recordings on 3 audio CDs. New to this edition is a recording of James Joyce reading “Anna Livia Plurabelle” from Finnegans Wake and, amazingly, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The ISBN (13) is 978-1-4022-1062-4. Perhaps a library near you will order it. Happy reading and listening.
The Oxford History of World Cinema, by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, recently turned ten years old. Here is a link to a description of the book:
Here is a link to Malcolm Jones‘s remembrance of author Frank McCourt, published online by Newsweek:
The University of Puget Sound has established an official Facebook page, in case you’d like to drop by to visit it:
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?id=17703862#/group.php?gid=2657635328
Two recent anthologies of Latino writing are Cuentos del Centro: Stories from the Latino Heartland and Primera Pagina: Poems from the Latino Heartland, both edited by The Latino Writers Collective in Kansas City, Missouri, and published by Scapegoat Press last year. An image of the cover from the poetry-anthology appears at left.
For more information about the Collective and the anthologies, please use the link:
Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) edited the anthology The Book of Luminous Things: An Intertnational Anthology of Poetry (Harvest Books, 1998), which remains in print. As amazon.com notes, Milosz, in his introduction to the anthology, describes the book as having gathered poems that are “short, clear, readable, and…realistic, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible.”
Denver is the site of a distinctive theater: Stories on Stage, which features notable actors from stage and screens (TV, cinema) who read selections of short fiction. What a great idea. Every production features four actors reading one short story each. For more information about the productions, the upcoming season, tickets, performers, and selections, please use the link:
Puget Sound English Department 