Emerson College WLP Reading Series, David Mura Reading at the Bill Bordy Theatre

If you are a non-Emerson guest, please RSVP for this reading event at Eventbrite.

A Stranger’s Journey: Race and Identity in Poetry and Prose by David Mura

David Mura is a poet, memoirist, novelist, and literary critic. His latest book is A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. He’s written two memoirs: Turning Japanese (a New York Times Notable Book; Josephine Miles Oakland PEN Award) and Where the Body Meets Memory. His four books of poetry: After We Lost Our Way (National Poetry Contest winner), The Colors of Desire (Carl Sandburg Award), Angels for the Burning, and The Last Incantations. He has taught at various universities and VONA, a conference for writers of color. He has worked with the Innocent Classroom, a program designed to train K-12 teachers to improve their relationships with students of color.

Emerson College WLP Scholar Series: Yu Jin Ko

Walker Building, Room 232
Free and open to the public.

Please RSVP by November 28 at this EventBrite link: https://yujinko.eventbrite.com

Non-Emerson guests must RSVP to be given visitor access.

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The Afterlives of Shakespeare’s Original Stage Conditions: From Boston to Seoul

Yu Jin Ko is Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he teaches Shakespeare, Studies in Fiction, and Writers of Color, among other topics. He is the author of Mutability and Division on Shakespeare’s Stage (2004) and co-editor of Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage. His articles and reviews continue to focus on Shakespeare in performance, both in the theater and on film, and include an essay on a production of Macbeth by inmates of a correctional institution. More recently, Ko has moved into the area of Shakespeare in Asia and “The Site of Burial in Two Korean Hamlets.”

Emerson College WLP Faculty/Alumni Reading Series

Free and open to the public.

Please RSVP by Nov 14 at this EventBrite link: https://tobinbell.eventbrite.com

Non-Emerson guests must RSVP to be given visitor access.

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Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and the newly published Blood Labors. He is author of the critical studies Awake in America, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, and On Serious Earth, forthcoming in 2019. Tobin is also editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Arts (with Pimone Triplett) and To The Many: The Collected Early Poems of Lola Ridge. His poetry has won the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Stephen Meringoff Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the 2016 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, 32 Poems, and Poetry International, and in anthologies including A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, Counter-Desecration: An Ecopoetics Glossary, Gracious: Contemporary Poems in the Twenty-first Century South, and Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change. Her work as a printer, released under the imprint To Do in the New Year, includes A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized prosody guide, and Forces of Attention, objects designed to help people use screened devices as they wish. The recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature, she teaches at UNC Wilmington, where she is editor of Ecotone and Lookout Books. She lives with her family near the Cape Fear River, and calls Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.

Emerson Faculty/Alumni Reading Series: RICHARD HOFFMAN & LEAH CARROLL

Emerson college is pleased to welcome faculty RICHARD HOFFMAN in conversation with LEAH CARROLL (pictured) about her memoir, Down City. This event will take place in The New Beard Room, 150 Boylston St., Boston, MA.

RICHARD HOFFMAN is the author of seven books, including the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, published in a 20th Anniversary Edition in 2015, and the 2014 memoir Love & Fury. In addition to the volume, Interference and Other Stories, he has published four collections of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; and most recently, Noon until Night. His work, both prose and verse, has been appearing regularly for the past forty years in such journals as Agni, Barrow Street, Consequence, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Witness and elsewhere. A former Chair of PEN New England, he is on leave this spring from his position as Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

LEAH CARROLL is the author of Down City: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory, and Murder. She graduated from Emerson College, and received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida. She is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Down City was a finalist for the 2017 Barnes and Noble Discover Awards and the 2017 New England Book Award.

Refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Non-Emerson attendees, please RSVP to angela_siew@emerson.edu by March 25.

HAMLET / SAINT JOAN

Behold William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw’s most famous creations side by side, in repertory, in HAMLET/ SAINT JOAN. He is the dark, enigmatic prince obsessed with seeking revenge for his father’s death. She is the steadfast rebel who challenged the powers of the Church to restore France to greatness. Iconic figures from two great dramatic classics — Hamlet and Saint Joan — are brought vividly to life in two riveting, unexpectedly funny, stripped-down stagings by four actors from Bedlam, the acclaimed New York City theater company, directed by ERIC TUCKER.

HAMLET

Prince Hamlet is depressed. Having been summoned home to Denmark to attend his father’s funeral, he is shocked to find his mother already remarried — to his father’s brother, Claudius. Worse still, Claudius has had himself crowned king despite the fact that Hamlet is heir to the throne. No wonder Hamlet suspects foul play. Bedlam brings their unique performance style to Shakespeare’s greatest play — arguably the greatest play in the English language.

SAINT JOAN

In this epic story, Shaw paints Joan of Arc not as a saint, witch or madwoman, but a farm girl who is an illiterate intellectual, a true genius whose focus on the individual rocked the Church and State to their core. Four actors perform all 24 roles in Bedlam’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, declared “Irresistible! Ferocious!” and “A force of nature!” by the New York Times.

“No troupe in New York these days rides the storytelling momentum of theater more resourcefully or enthusiastically than Bedlam.” – The New York Times

Pride & Prejudice: Theatre for Young Audiences Adaptation

Don’t miss Pride & Prejudice adapted by Jon Jory young audiences, from the novel by Jane Austen.

This production, directed by Courtney O’Connor, runs between December 1st and December 9th.

Finding a husband isn’t Elizabeth Bennet’s most urgent priority, but it’s difficult to escape the subject—especially once she meets the enigmatic Mr. Darcy. But in a society where subtle snubs and deceit proliferate, is it possible for Elizabeth and Darcy to look beyond his pride and her prejudice? This refreshingly fast-paced and engaging new adaptation of one of the most beloved novels of all time captures the wit and romance of Jane Austen’s writing. The story may be set in Regency-era England, but our struggles with love, money, pride, and prejudice are still ongoing today.

ArtsEmerson premieres The White Card by CLAUDIA RANKINE

In this stunning world premiere at ArtsEmerson, The White Card unfolds a meticulously crafted story, raising uncomfortable questions about what — and who — are on display.

Exploring contemporary headlines and cultural touchstones, CLAUDIA RANKINE‘s The White Card refuses to remain “just a play,” safely entrenched on the stage. Like her 2014 New York Times bestselling book of poetry entitled Citizen: An American Lyric, this new play unpacks the insidious ways in which racism manifests itself in everyday situations, prompting the question, “Can American society progress if whiteness stays invisible?”

In the elegant loft of a powerful, well-intentioned white couple in the New York City art world, a black artist named Charlotte Cummings arrives in the hopes of selling her new work. When the couple’s activist son joins them for dinner, tensions arise, truths are interrogated and the notion of intent — both conscious and unconscious — becomes paramount.

ArtsEmerson presents Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia

ArtsEmerson is pleased to present Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia.

Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia is an extraordinary new composition fusing music, film, voice and movement. It is the first major symphonic work that addresses the traumas that occurred in Cambodia in the late seventies, and is the first collaboration between the Oscar-nominated director Rithy Panh and lauded composer Him Sophy — both survivors of the Khmer Rouge and now at the forefront of Cambodia’s cultural renaissance. Anchored in “bangsokol” — a ritual for the dead or soon to be deceased — the performance intertwines traditional Khmer instruments with The Metropolis Ensemble orchestra and the Taipei Philharmonic Chamber Choir. All together, they create something innately Cambodian but relatable to audiences everywhere.

Bangsokol is an act of cultural renewal, aiming to return the arts to their place at the heart of Cambodian society. While the world continues to witness new genocides, wars and destruction, Bangsokol urges us to express our scars from the past in order to forge a new path forward.

Breakwater Reading Series at Brookline Booksmith

Join Brookline Booksmith for a night of new fiction, nonfiction and poetry from the MFA candidates of Boston University, Emerson College, and UMass Boston.

The Breakwater Reading Series is Boston’s inter-MFA program showcase, featuring student writers from Boston University, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts-Boston performing the best in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.  Six fresh voices read in each installment of this popular series, presented by the Graduate Writing Department at UMass-Boston. Readings are held at Brookline Booksmith, one of Boston’s most wonderful independent bookstores, at 7pm on the third Friday of every month from September through June.

The event is always free and open to the public and regularly draws an audience of 60+ attendees from the Boston community.

Step Afrika: The Migration at the EmersonArts Theater

Step Afrika! triumphantly returns to Boston with The Migration, a multimedia powerhouse production that chronicles and celebrates the paths of the brave men and women who left the American South searching for better opportunities. Inspired by painter Jacob Lawrence’s groundbreaking series about “The Great Migration,” the company transforms the work into a textured, interdisciplinary movement piece incorporating South African Gumboot, Western African dance, vocals, drumming and audience participation.

“A show that needs to be experienced: a blend of incredible movement, rhythms and singing” – DC Theatre Scene