Back to the Afrofuture: A Conversation with Ytasha Womack at Emerson College

Presented by Emerson College WLP Reading Series. Co-sponsored by Emerson’s School of the Arts, Graduate Studies, Admissions and the Career Development Center.

This event is a Webinar on Wed, Nov 7, 7-8pm EST with a Live Audience located in Ansin 604. The Webinar is free and open to the public. The Live Audience portion is limited to current Emerson students, faculty and staff.

Please RSVP by November 6 at EventBrite (Webinar instructions located on EventBrite): http://womack.eventbrite.com

Ytasha L. Womack is an award-winning producer, director, author, and innovator. She is author of the critically acclaimed books Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture, Rayla 2212, Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity; and co-edited Beats Rhymes and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip Hop. Afrofuturism is a 2014 Locus Awards Nonfiction Finalist, and Post Black was hailed as a Booklist Top 10 Black History Reader of 2010. Her films include Love Shorts and The Engagement. The Engagement was nominated for Best Film at the American Black Film Festival. A Chicago native, she recently co-founded Afrofuturism849 to host discussions and events in Afrofuturism. She shoots her sci-fi film Bar Star City later this year.

Memoirist MARY KARR at Emerson

Emerson’s WLP Reading Series is pleased to present a Q&A and reading with MARY KARR.

MARY KARR is an award-winning poet and New York Times best-selling memoirist, and the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed, best-selling memoirs The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. Her latest books are The Art of Memoir, a master class on the fastest-growing literary genre which debuted at #3 on the New York Times Bestseller List and was blanketed in stellar reviews, and a book for graduates based on her acclaimed 2015 Syracuse commencement speech, Now Go Out There (and Get Curious). In 2015 Syracuse University awarded Karr an honorary doctorate in humane letters. Karr added songwriter to her pedigree with the release of Kin: Songs by Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell.

Q&A: 4pm
Piano Row, The New Charles Beard Room, 2nd floor
Emerson College, 150 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02116

Reading: 6pm
The Bill Bordy Theater, 1st floor
Emerson College, 216 Tremont St., Boston, MA 02116

This reading is free and open to the public.

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.

Emerson’s WLP Reading Series: AMY HEMPEL: CANCELLED

Emerson college’s Writing Literature and Publishing (WLP) program is pleased to welcome short story writer AMY HEMPEL for a reading from her work.

AMY HEMPEL is the author of four collections of stories. Collected Stories was named one of the New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year, won the Ambassador Award, and the Harold Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an inaugural United States Artists Foundation Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, and many others. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, The Quarterly, GQ, The Harvard Review, and more, and has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize, the Best Non-Required Reading, and Life is Short–Art is Shorter. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Letters, she teaches at Bennington College and Stony Brook University, and lives near New York City.

This free reading free is open to the public.