Calendar Alert: Burlington, Vermont, This Week, Poetry and Nonfiction: Delanty, Schley, Broyard

Poet Major Jackson at the University of Vermont sent us these alerts -- and if you're in or near the Burlington area, you'll get a rich treat. Matter of fact, I think it's worth quite a drive for both Wednesday (today) and Thursday (tomorrow):

The Fleming Museum presents a poetry series hosted by Major Jackson, associate professor, UVM Dept. of English. This reading series highlights established and emergent New England poets whose work represents significant explorations into language, song, and art. Co-sponsored with the English Department and funded in part by the James and Mary Buckham Fund.

FLEMING MUSUEM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25
Greg Delanty & Jim Schley
6:00 - 6:25 PM: Music by Christopher Barosky & Friends
6:30 - 7:30: Poetry Readings

Jim Schley is the author of As When, In Season (Marick Press, 2008). He earned a Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and for many years worked as a literary editor and toured extensively with experimental and activist theater companies, including the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater, the Swiss ensemble Les Montreurs d’Images, and Flock Dance Troupe. He is former co-editor of New England Review and editor of the anthology Writing in a Nuclear Age and of more than a hundred books on a diversity of subjects. After a sudden change of fortune he became an extreme freelancer and had twenty-four part-time jobs in one year, an experience described in an essay written for Newsweek magazine. His poems and essays have been featured in Ironwood, Crazyhorse, Rivendell, and Orion, on Garrison Keillor’s radio show “The Writer’s Almanac,” in Best American Spiritual Writing, and in a chapbook, One Another (Chapiteau, 1999). An associate member of the journalists’ collective Homelands Productions, from 2006 through 2008 he was executive director of The Frost Place, a museum and poetry center based at Robert Frost’s historic farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. He lives with his wife and their daughter in a house they built themselves on an off-the-grid cooperative in Vermont.

Greg Delanty teaches at St. Michael’s College, Vermont. For a part of the year he lives in Derrynane, County Kerry. His recent books are The Ship of Birth (Carcanet Press 2003), The Blind Stitch (Carcanet) and The Hellbox (Oxford University Press 1998). His Collected Poems 1986-2006 is out from the Oxford Poet’s series of Carcanet Press. He has received many awards, most recently a Guggenheim for poetry. The Guggenheim is to assist him in with his next book of poems The Greek Anthology, Book XVII-- a selection of his owm poem using the template of the sixteen books of The Greek Anthology.

Non-fiction Reading

Thursday, February 26, 5:00 pm in Old Mill, John Dewey Lounge

Two months before he died of cancer, renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard called his grown son and daughter to his side, intending to reveal a secret he had kept all their lives and most of his own: he was black. But even as he lay dying, the truth was too difficult for him to share, and it was his wife who told Bliss that her WASPy, privileged Connecticut childhood had come at a price. Ever since his own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to "pass" in order to get work, Anatole had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity. With unsparing candor and nuanced insight, Broyard chronicles her evolution from sheltered WASP to a woman of mixed race ancestry.
About Author

Bliss Broyard is the author of the collection of stories, My Father, Dancing, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Her fiction and essays have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Art of the Essay, and have appeared in Grand Street, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Elle Magazine and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.