Tag Archives: 92nd Street Y

JULIANA SPAHR AND CLAUDIA RANKINE

DU BOIS’S TELEGRAM is a brilliant inquiry into the institutions—from the CIA to the foundations and literary magazines it funded—that inform and shape literary production. The promoted, the funded and heralded—from Richard Wright to Gertrude Stein to James Baldwin—do the work of the nation state under the umbrella of culture. Our complicit freedoms are brought out in the open in this thought-provoking and erudite book. This is not a book to agree or disagree with, but rather a compelling argument that brings relevant facts forward for clear-eyed consideration. One would be remiss to pass on such essential research and analysis.” — Claudia Rankine

Juliana Spahr—author of DU BOIS’S TELEGRAM —will be joined by Rankine for a discussion about the book, which takes as its impetus the telegram W.E.B. Du Bois sent when he was denied a passport to attend the 1956 Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris:

“Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” — W.E.B. Du Bois

 

CLAUDINE RANKINE AND JULIANA SPAHR

Thursday, December 13, at 7:30 pm.

92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City.

 

DUBOIS’S TELEGRAM—LITERARY RESISTANCE AND STATE CONTAINMENT, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Above: Claudia Rankine.

Below: Juliana Spahr.

MARILYNN ROBINSON

Marilynne Robinson will read from her new collection of essays What Are We Doing Here?, which addresses our current political climate, as well as “how the work of thinkers such as Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness, and how beauty informs and disciplines daily life.”*

 

MARILYNN ROBINSON, Tuesday, February 20, at 7:30 pm.

KAUFMANN CONCERT HALL, 92ND STREET Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City.

92y.org/marilynne-robinson

See Christopher Lydon’s interview with Robinson:

lithub.com/marilynne-robinson-on-what-were-losing-in-president-obama

marilynne-robinson

MURIEL SPARK

The centenary of Muriel Spark—the writer “whose wit produced effects and insights only matched in contemporary fiction by the glittering jests of Nabokov” (Shirley Hazzard)will be celebrated this week with readings of Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and more, by Rivka Galchen, Joseph O’Neill, Gerald Howard, and Joseph Kanon.

A CELEBRATION OF MURIEL SPARK

Thursday, February 1, at 8 pm.

Buttenwieser Hall, 92nd Street Y 

1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City.

From top: Muriel Spark, image credit Museums and Galleries Edinburgh; image credit New Directions Publishing.

FOR DEREK WALCOTT

“What better way is there to memorialize a writer than to read what he has written and remember who he was in all those worlds of words he was brave and confident enough to imagine in the first place?” Hilton Als on Derek Walcott

Join Elizabeth Alexander, Robert Antoni, Carolyn Forché, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica Kincaid, Karl Kirchwey, Yusef Komunyakaa, Glyn Maxwell, Caryl Phillips, and Als in this celebration and remembrance of the late poet.

 

A CELEBRATION OF DEREK WALCOTT, Thursday, January 18, at 7:30 pm.

KAUFMANN CONCERT HALL, 92ND STREET Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City.

92y.org/a-celebration-of-derek-walcott

Derek Walcott. Photograph by Horst Toppe, Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

derek-walcott-at-the-glob-007