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New Writing Series Fall 2011

Raúl Zurita, Friday, September 30, 2011, 5:00-7:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
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 Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile in 1951. He started out studying mathematics before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet's 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form a radical artistic group CADA, and he became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances. In the early 80’s, Zurita famously sky-wrote passages from his poem, The New Life, over Manhattan and later (still during the reign of Pinochet) he bulldozed the phrase Ni Pena Ni Miedo (Without Pain Or Fear) into the Atacama Desert, where it can still be seen because children in the neighboring town bring shovels into the desert and turn over the sand in the letters. For fifteen years, Zurita worked on a trilogy which is considered one of the signal poetic achievements in Latin American poetry: Purgatory appeared in 1979, Ante-paradise in 1982, and The New Life in 1993. Zurita is one of the most renowned contemporary Latin American poets, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. Translations of Purgatory and Ante-paradise were published in the United States in the 80’s. Three new books, INRI, translated by William Rowe, Song of the Disappeared Love, translated by Daniel Borzutzky, and Purgatory, translated by Anna Deeny, have recently appeared from, respectively, Merick Press, Action Books, and The University of California Press. His books of poems include, among others: El Sermon de la Montana; Areas Verdes; Purgatorio; Anteparadiso; El Paraiso Esta Vacio - Canto a Su Amor, Desaparecido, El Amor de Chile, La Vida Nueva, In Memoriam.

Additionally sponsored by The International Poets in Conversation, part of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute's consortium tour

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Daniel Shapiro, Wednesday, October 5, 2011, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
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 Daniel Shapiro's poems, translations, and prose have been published in The American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, CNN.com, Confrontation, Electric Literature, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, The Quarterly Conversation, and other publications.  He is author of the manuscripts "The Red Handkerchief and Other Poems" and "Woman at the Cusp of Twilight." His translation of Cipango, by Chilean poet Tomas Harris, was published by Bucknell University Press in 2010; the book received a starred review in Library Journal and has also been praised in The American Poetry Review, BOMB, Hispamerica, and World Literature Today. Shapiro has received translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN Translation Fund. He is currently translating Mexican writer Roberto Ransom's short-story collection Desaparecidos, animales y artistas (Missing Persons, Animals and Artists). He introduced Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos's The Smoke of Distant Fires (forthcoming, Open Letter). Shapiro serves as Director of Literature at the Americas Society in New York and Editor of the Society's journal Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. During his tenure there, he has presented hundreds of writers from throughout the Americas and published their work in Review; they have included Nobel Prize-winners Mario Vargas Llosa, Derek Walcott, Octavio Paz, and many younger writers.

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Halina Duraj, Wednesday, October 26, 2011, 4:30-6:00 p.m. at the Visual Arts Facility: Performance Space
hduraj Halina Duraj's fiction and non-fiction have appeared in literary journals including Witness, Third Coast, and Hayden's Ferry Review. Her novel, Fatherland, was a finalist for the 2010 UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction, and other work has been recommended for the 2009 PEN/O'Henry Award and the 2009 Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology. She received her Ph.D. in English and creative writing from the University of Utah and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego, where she teaches courses on literature and fiction writing.

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Sandra Doller, RESCHEDULED TO Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 4:30-6:00 p.m. in the Literature Building, Room 155 (de Certeau)
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 Sandra Doller's books include "Oriflamme," "Chora" (Ahsahta Press, Boise State University 2005 & 2010, respectively) and "Man Years" (Subito Press, University of Colorado-Boulder, 2011). She is newly at work on an experimental nonfiction/performance sequence "Memory of the Prose Machine," selections of which have been featured in Sputen Duyvil's "Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary XXperimental Prose by Women Writers" (2008), and as a mixed audio piece in Drunken Boat's Bernadette Mayer folio. Other projects include a book of collaborative visual anti-sonnets "The Sonneteers," a poem-photo series with Daniel Gustav Cramer, and translations from the French of Charles Cros and Eric Suchere. Sandra Doller is the founder and editor of 1913 a journal of forms, 1913 Press, and the publisher of Read, an annual anthology of inter-translation. Doller's poetry and prose appear frequently in literary magazines including The Poetry Project Newsletter, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Verse, Jubilat, Triple Canopy, Tarpaulin Sky, and anthologies such as The I.E. Reader (Narrow House) and Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (University of Iowa Press). Since beginning her studies in Theatre & Dance (Amherst College, 1992-1995) and completing a BA in Women's Studies (University of Washington, 1997), an MA in Humanities (University of Chicago, 2001), and an MFA in Poetry (Iowa Writers' Workshop, 2003), Sandra has taught multi-genre creative writing, literature, and film at Hollins University and Cornell College, served as Distinguished Visiting Writer in Boise State University's MFA program and Project Coordinator for Ohio's national championship-winning Poetry Out Loud, and worked as a Poet-in-the-Schools. A recipient of the Paul Engle-James Michener Fellowship, the Summer Literary Seminars Fellowship in St. Petersburg, the Iowa Arts Fellowship, and Individual Artist Grants from the states of Iowa and Maryland, Doller joined the Literature & Writing Studies faculty at California State University-San Marcos in 2007.

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