English Department Events

Department Events Spring 2024

 

 

March 25, 2024 - Òscar Moisés Diaz Poetry Reading

Diaz will read new and old poems based on dreams. The new poems in particular all engage with medieval Islamic dream dictionaries.


Òscar Moisés Díaz is a poet-astrologer, film curator, and artist. They’ve exhibited art in places such as the 10th Central American Biennial, International Film Festival of El Salvador, Queens Museum, The Museum of Art El Salvador, and a solo exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Costa Rica. They are an inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Poetry Project, NYC. They are a member of Tierra Narrative and a contributing editor at Asphalte Magazine. Recent poems can be found in Schlag Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes and Screen Door Review. They run a full-time consulting astrologer practice at cielosueloastrology.com.

Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108. 

 

March 26, 2024 - In Collaboration with Pomona's Art Department: Grace Rosario Perkins Artist Talk

Grace Rosario Perkins (b. 1986, Santa Fe, NM, lives and works in Brooklyn) is a self-taught Diné/Akimel O’odham painter interested in disassembling her personal narrative through layered words, objects, colors, and signs. Recent exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibition, The Relevance of Your Data (MOCA Tucson, curated by Laura Copelin, 2022), which featured large-scale paintings alongside contributions from Lonnie Holley, Fox Maxy, Olen Perkins, and Eric-Paul Riege; De Boer, Los Angelese (2023), and Best Western, Santa Fe (2023). Two -person and group shows include James Fuentes, New York, (2023), Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis (2023); Marvin Gardens, New York (2023); Oakland Museum of California (2019); and ONE Archives, Los Angeles (2021). Perkins most recently served as an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Mills College.

Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.

 

March 28, 2024 - Words for Better Worlds: Trans Asian and Indigenous Diasporic Poets Read New Work

Please join us for a poetry reading from Dr. MT Vallarta, author of What You Refuse to Remember (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023) and féi hernandez, author of Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications, 2020) and (UN)DOCUMENTE (Naomi Press, 2025).

Light dinner and refreshments will be served. A Zoom livestream will be available, see QR code.

Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.

 

April 04, 2024 - Cintelechy Screenings

Event will be held at 7:00PM at the Benton Museum of Art's Art After Hours.

 

April 10, 2024 - Department Fair

Please join the English department to meet professors and learn about upcoming Fall courses! Any and all majors are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

Event will be held 4pm-6pm in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.

 

April 11, 2024 - Untold Stories: Book Party

Come and celebrate the publication of Dr. Divita's book, Untold Stories: Legacies of Authoritarianism among Spanish Labour Migrants in Later Life by the University of Toronto Press. Untold Stories features an ethnography of a community of seniors who were born around the time of Spain's civil war (1936-1939), came of age during its repressive aftermath, and migrated to France as young adults in search of economic opportunity. Through detailed analysis of their conversational interactions, Dr. Divita shows how history lives among individuals in later life—not as a static domain of facts and figures, but in the narrative forms that animate or haunt their everyday encounters.

David Divita, a sociocultural linguist and linguistic anthropologist, specializes in Spanish- and French-speaking people and places. His interests include the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of aging; the experience of belonging, displacement and long-term multilingualism; and the politics of history and memory-in particular as these phenomena operate among populations with national and affective attachments to contemporary Spain and France.

Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.

 

April 18, 2024 - ‘But Let Us In’: Invitations and The Old Wives’ Tale with Kate Bonnici

An invitation: What if we enter into a literary work and don't pick up its pieces to classify like small stones — this is this and that does that - but instead wander among the stones, which could be bones? What if we do not claim to know the exclusive purposes of what we encounter? What if we attend to how words feel when held, what they sound like when they fall? This talk will explore the ways George Peele's 1595 play The Old Wives' Tale invites such convergence between critical and creative writing, which is a space of making and unmaking, a time of re/creation.

Dr. Kate Bolton Bonnici grew up in Alabama and holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law (JD), UC Riverside (MFA), and UCLA (PhD). Her debut collection, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her second collection, A True & Just Record, was published by Boiler House Press/Beyond Criticism Editions (2023). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Maine Review, Image, Arts & Letters, Tupelo Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, CounterText, Exemplaria, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Pepperdine University.

Event will be held at 4:30PM in the Ena Thompson Room Crookshank 108.


April 25, 2024 - Performance by Julian Talamantex Brolaski.

Julian Talamantex Brolaski will be performing its recently released country music at the Benton.

Event will be held at 7:00PM at the Benton Museum of Art's Art After Hours.

 

April 26, 2024 - Senior Thesis Symposium

Join the English Department in celebrating our graduating thesis students and their accomplishments! There will be snacks and refreshments.

Event will be held at 8am-2pm in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.

 

 

 

 

Past Events

 

February 21, 2024 - "Clothed in our Fraile Attire": Textile and Texts in the Works of Aemilia Lanyer

Please join us for a talk from poet, literary critic, and professor Kimberly Johnson.

1611 saw the publication of a book remarkable not only for its ambitious scope and its boldly protofeminist rewritings of familiar biblical stories, but also because it was authored by a woman. In her volume Salve Deus Rex ludaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer uses a number of metaphors taken from the fabric arts—sewing, embroidery, and other housewifely concerns—and she frequently stitches together her spiritual contemplations with terminology from sempstressry. This pattern, which is continuous throughout both her great poetic work and the dedicatory poems that preface it, spins a connective thread between Christ's incarnation and the domestic sphere—the province of women's authority. This talk will show how Lanyer uses language from what is conventionally dismissed as mere women's work to claim Christ under the authority of women.

This event will be held at 4:30 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.

 

February 22, 2024 - Reading and Artists Talk from Layli Long Soldier

Please join us for a reading and artist talk from poet, writer, and artist Layli Long Soldier. This event will also be broadcast live over the air with KSPC–tune in to 88.7fm or stream online at kspc.org.

Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She is a mentor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This event will be held at 4:30PM PST in the Rose Hills Theater, with a reception to follow the reading.

 

 

February 29, 2024 - A Poetry Reading with Toby Altman

Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy's Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). Altman has held fellowships from the Graham Foundation, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Altman is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Beloit College. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the lowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, where his dissertation "The Shock of the Old: Periodization, Poetics, and Diachronic Exchange between the Renaissance and the Avant-Garde," received the Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation. His criticism has been widely published, including articles and essays in Contemporary Literature, English Literary History, The Georgia Review, and Jack.

This event will be held at 4:30 PM PST in Crookshank 108 Ena Thompson Reading Room.

 

March 20, 2024 - Four 'First Novelists' from the 5Cs

Please join us in this unique celebration of four writers just setting out on remarkable careers, all of whom were recently part of our Claremont creative writing community.

Francesca Capossela (Trouble the Living, Pomona ‘18)

David Connor (Oh God, The Sun Goes, Pomona ‘15)

Julius Taranto (How I Won a Nobel Prize, Pomona ‘12)

Tyriek White (We Are A Haunting, Pitzer ‘13)

The readings and conversation will be introduced by Pomona Professor Jonathan Lethem and four special “mentor” guests: Charmaine Craig (Pomona), Brian Evenson (Cal Arts MFA), Laura Harris (Pitzer), Kevin Dettmar (Pomona).

Event will be held at 7:00PM at the Rose Hills Theater. Admission is free, seating unreserved.