Literature
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Zimmer to develop Responsible AI course
Zimmer will join colleagues from around the U.S. to plan classes that better explore the impact of artificial intelligence on our world.
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Harryette Mullen named 2022 Humanities Division Distinguished Graduate Student Alumna
The Humanities Division’s 2022 Distinguished Graduate Student Alumna, Harryette Mullen (M.A. Literature ’86, Ph.D. Literature ’90), published her first poetry book Tree Tall Women in 1981 and has since published dozens of poems, stories, books, and essays that have been published worldwide and reprinted in over one hundred anthologies.
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Introducing The 2022 Deep Read: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz announces the return of The Deep Read annual program. The group will read Transcendent Kingdom, the acclaimed novel from Brooklyn-based author Yaa Gyasi.
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‘From the Margins: Dante 701 Years Later’ to provide critical perspectives on author’s work
Funded through the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment and presented by The Humanities Institute, the series will include events taking place throughout 2022 to engage with Dante’s work through a much different lens than the usual discussions of his life and work.
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Grant supports project to digitize, preserve materials at Biblioteca Amazónica
The project will concentrate its efforts on those items within the archives that are unique to the Biblioteca Amazónica and not available elsewhere. One important inclusion will be back issues of three local newspapers — El Eco, La Razón, and El Oriente — that have never been fully digitized before.
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Alumna bell hooks—celebrated feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist, and writer—dies at 69
bell hooks was the author of over two dozen books that ranged from the groundbreaking text ‘Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism’ to her deeply felt memoir ‘Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood’.
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Karen Tei Yamashita receives 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
Yamashita used her acceptance speech, in part, to emphasize the significance of this medal being awarded to an Asian-American writer “especially this year, post-pandemic, having weathered the Twitter absurdity, corruption, and mendacity; the brutality of racial profiling; and the provocation of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim, [and] anti-Asian hatred.”
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New grant to support Dickens Project programming in year ahead
The programming in 2022 is focused on questions of race and social justice in the 19th century and today, with the summer’s Dickens Universe event broadening its purview by pairing a British novel with an African-American novel.
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Award-winning poet Gary Young to read at 12th annual Morton Marcus memorial event
Gary Young has written powerful, richly detailed verses often inspired by the bounty of the natural world. And as with most great poetry, Young’s work is great on the page, but truly comes to life when it is read aloud.


