Literature
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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.
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Graduate student organizing community workshops on the queer Black experience
Mia Boykin is expanding her Black.Queer.Alive. project to include four community workshops that will explore fitness, creativity, politics and entrepreneurship.
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Graduate student explores gay literature’s contributions to social movements, canon
Eric Sneathen explores how gay men, beginning in the 1960s, formed a literary community, wrote or curated poems and other literary works about their experiences, and how this community informed the more recent social movements around gay identity.
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Registration open for the 40th annual Virtual Dickens Universe featuring ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Dickens Universe is an annual gathering of scholars, teachers, and members of the general public who share a love of Dickens’s writings and his era. This summer, the Universe features A Christmas Carol and will take place online.




