All Announcements

Recent Award Winning Music Titles from Wesleyan

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Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine by Maria Sonevytsky received the 2020 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society (AMS). The Lockwood Award honors each year a musicological book of exceptional merit published during the previous year in any language and in any country by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career who is a member of the AMS or a citizen or permanent resident of Canada or the United States.

Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson received the 2020 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), which honors each year a book collection of ethnomusicological essays of exceptional merit edited by a scholar or scholars.

In addition, co-editor Dylan Robinson received SEM’s Helen Roberts Prize for his chapter contributed to Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America, “Speaking to Water, Singing to Stone: Peter Morin, Rebecca Belmore, and the Ontologies of Indigenous Modernity.” The prize recognizes the most significant article in ethnomusicology written by members of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America also received the 2020 Ruth A. Solie Award for Edited Collections from the American Musicological Society (AMS), which honors each year a collection of musicological essays of exceptional merit published during the previous year in any language and in any country and edited by a scholar or scholars.

Congratulations to the authors, editors, and contributors to these volumes.

Samhain / Halloween!

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Happy Samhain and Happy Halloween! Check out some of WUP’s festive publications for the season–Spells by Annie Finch and Food for the Dead by Michael Bell.

A feminist and a pagan, Annie Finch writes about love, spirituality, death, nature, and the patterns of time. Spell: New and Selected Poems, ranges from female and earth-centered spirituality to chants and other experimental forms. The collection includes poems from over her career in a stunning collection that is perfect for this Halloween season. The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells is a tiny book of poetry spells connected to elemental forces—a great gift for yourself or for the poetry witch in your life.

Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by Michael E. Bell is another publication perfect for Halloween. Author and folklorist Michael Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead. You can read more about “The Great New England Vampire Panic” in this article from Smithsonian Magazine. It features Bell, and Nick Bellantoni, another Wesleyan author and former state archeologist of Connecticut.

          

Will Harris Wins Felix Dennis Prize

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Congratulations to poet Will Harris! His debut poetry collection RENDANG is the recipient of the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

Given by the Forward Arts Foundation, the prize honors excellence in contemporary poetry published in the UK and Ireland, including Best Collection, Best First Collection, and Best Single Poem. Harris is the winner of the prize for Best First Collection.

Using long poems, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms, RENDANG is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. Drawing on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage, Will Harris shows us new ways to think about the contradictions of identity and cultural memory. He creates companions that speak to us in multiple languages. They deftly ask us to consider how and what we look at, as well as what we don’t look at and why. It is intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combines a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting.

An event announcing Harris and other winners will be hosted by the British Library online at 3 PM (British time). Check out more information here.

 

Wesleyan UP at SEM 2020

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We are pleased to be participating in the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting, kicking off on October 22nd.

Check out events with these Wesleyan authors and editors…

Julia Byl
Thursday, October 29, 2:00 – 3:30pm
Panel Session 9G: Music, Labor, Commerce
Chair

Saturday, 2:00 – 4:00pm
Panel Session 12J: Proselytizers, Preachers, and Music in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indonesia
Discussant

Corrina Campbell
Thursday, October 29, 10:00 am–12:00 pm (EDT)
Panel Session 8D: Sonic (dis)orientations: E/merging Selves and Worlds Through Embodied Experience
Presentation: #MyLifeIsWorthMoreThanGold: Sounding Out the Human Cost of Suriname’s Mining Economy in Maroon Popular Music

Eric Charry
Thursday, October 29, 10:00am–12:00pm (EDT)
Panel Session 8B: Rethinking Jazz Canons
Presentation: An Ethnography of the Five Spot Café

Tomie Hahn
Thursday, October 29, 10:00 am–12:00 pm (EDT)
Panel Session 8D: Sonic (dis)orientations: E/merging Selves and Worlds Through Embodied Experience
Presentation: Perplexing Sense-scapes: Analyzing and Displaying Experience

Ian MacMillen
Friday, October 23, 2:30–3:00 pm (EDT)
Panel session 4E (Exploring European Musical Pasts, Politics, & Futures: Technologies, Sounds, and Silences)
Presentation: Sonically Mediated Forgetting and the Quiet Art of Remembrance in the Music of Avant-Garde Yugoslav Rock Ensemble Laibach

Dylan Robinson
Thursday, October 22, 10:00am–12:00pm (EDT)
Session 8L Roundtable: Intersectional Listening Positionality

Friday, October 23, 2:00-4:00 pm (EDT)
Panel Session 4A: Roundtable
Disrupting White Supremacy in Music and Sound Studies

Mark Slobin
Thursday, October 22, 10:00–11:30 am (EDT)
Panel Session 1E : Jewish Diasporas and Repertoires
Presentation: The Resurgence of Yiddish Folksong

Michael Veal
Saturday, October 24, 2:00–4:00pm (EDT)
Panel Session 12C: Walls, Wires, and Waves: Materials of Meaning and the Politics of Sound in Large Performance Venues

Deborah Wong
Friday, October 23, 10:00–11:30am (EDT)
Panel Session 3A: President’s Roundtable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in SEM
Sponsored by the SEM Board and the SEM Diversity Action Committee Chair: Mellonee V. Burnim, Chair, Diversity Action Committee; Indiana University

Thursday, October 29, 12:30–1:30 pm (EDT)
Panel Session 8L: Roundtable
Conversations: Reimagining Ethnomusicology – Towards a More Equitable Ethnomusicology
Facilitated by Deonte Harris, Duke University, with Mellonee V. Burnim, Indiana University Deborah Wong, University of California, Riverside Maya Cunningham, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Thursday, October29, 2:00–3:30 pm (EDT)
Panel Session 9E: Ethnographic Position

View the website for the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day

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Today we recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We pause to note our publications by indigenous authors, which include fiction, poetry, theatrical work, and nonfiction prose.

Forthcoming from Wesleyan is Gearld Vizenor’s anticipated novel Satie on the Seine. It is a powerful epistolary novel that interweaves history, cultural stories, and irony to reveal a shadow play of truth and politics. Basile Hudon Beaulieu lives in a houseboat on the River Seine in Paris between 1932 and 1945. He observes the liberals, fascist, artists, and bohemians, and presents puppet shows with his brother. His thoughts and experiences are documented in the form of fifty letters to the heirs of the fur trade. Vizenor, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, lends a unique voice of Native American presence and survivance in the world of literature, and in his inimitable creative style he delivers a moving, challenging, and darkly humorous commentary on modernity.

Abigail Chabitnoy’s debut poetry collection How to Dress a Fish, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. A poet of Aleut descent, Chabitnoy looks at boarding school records, Russian ethnologies, and her own family history to fight against the attempted erasure of indigenous experiences.

Other recent work by indigenous people include Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light and Soul Talk, Song Language by United StatesPoet Laureate Joy Harjo, the first Native American to hold that honor. A multitalented artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, Harjo explores the genres of playwriting, personal essays, interviews, and conversations in these two works. Primarily known as a poet, Harjo has authored a number of poetry collections, including In Mad Love and War, consisting of poems that explore rage, grief, oppression, and the reality of living on stolen land.

Learn more about these authors and their books…

 

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill: with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen

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The coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep through the world with a seemingly unbeatable force. As scientists warn us to stay vigilant against the virus, people struggle to put language to the sorrow of our present moment—especially those who have lost loved ones or who have become ill themselves. How do we describe experiences with infection and pain, particularly when the sickness is unprecedented? What does it mean to grapple with grief related to illness? And how can we shape these experiences into literary practice?

On Being Ill: with Notes from Sick Rooms (now available through Wesleyan University Press) presents the timeless words of Virginia Woolf and her mother Julia Stephen in textual conversation for the first time in literary history. In the poignant and humorous essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf observes that though illness is a part of every human being’s experience, it is not celebrated as a subject of great literature in the way that love and war are embraced by writers and readers. We must, Woolf says, invent a new language to describe pain. Illness, she observes, enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness; it is “the great confessional.” Woolf discusses the taboos associated with illness and explores how it changes our relationship to the world around us.

“Notes from Sick Rooms” addresses illness from the caregiver’s perspective. With clarity, humor, and pathos, Julia Stephen offers concrete and useful information to caregivers today. In a time when doctors, nurses, and family members of sick loved ones are taking on caregiver roles, Julia Stephen’s perspective serves as indispensable insight and comfort.

Originally published by Paris Press in 2002, as On Being Ill, this paperback edition includes an introduction to “Notes from Sick Rooms” and to Julia Stephen by Mark Hussey, the founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a poignant afterword by Rita Charon, MD, the founder of the field of Narrative Medicine. Hermione Lee’s brilliant introduction to “On Being Ill” is a superb introduction to Virginia Woolf’s life and writing. This book is embraced by the general public, the literary world, and the medical world, and is a quintessential tool in our present moment and in the years to come.

Announcing “Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems” by Alfred Arteaga

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“Alfred Arteaga’s poems have the courage of dislocation, moved in underworld descent, migration, prophecy, protest, starry skies, and heteroglossia. Gathered at last into a single book, Xicancuicatl is an epic cycle for our times.”
—Edgar Garcia, author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography

Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems collects the poetry of leading avant-garde Chicano poet Alfred Arteaga (1950–2008), whom French philosopher Gilles Deleuze regarded as “among those rare poets who are able to raise or shape a new language within their language.” In his five published collections, Arteaga made crucial breakthroughs in the language of poetry, basing his linguistic experiments on the multilingual Xicanx culture of the US Southwest. His formal resources and finely tuned ear for sound patterns and language play remain astonishing. His poetical work, presented as a whole here for the first time, pursues a steadily unfolding project that draws on the tradition of Xicanx writing from the eighteenth-century poet and nun Sor Juana de la Cruz to his contemporaries in the Chicano Renaissance.

Arteaga’s poetry is a sustained and exemplary unfolding of Xicanx poetics out of the historical situation of radical border- and language-crossing and remains still virtually the only work of this rhetorical orientation and theoretical sophistication carried out in the field. His poetry speaks more than ever to a moment in which border-crossing, cultural diversity, language-mixing and a multi-cultural vision of America are critical issues. Read a sample poem from the collection below:

ALFRED ARTEAGA (1950–2008) is a renowned Chicanx poet and scholar whose work stretches across cultural and linguistic barriers. He was professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

DAVID LLOYD is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and author of several books on postcolonial and cultural theory, literature, poetry and poetics.

CHERRÍE MORAGA is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English.

Happy Birthday to Mary Rogers Williams!

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book cover

book cover and author photo

Today, September 30th, 2020, would have been Mary Rogers Williams’ 163rd birthday. The obscure, often forgotten American tonalist and Impressionist artist was most well known for her stunning pastel and oil portraits and landscapes. Born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, as a baker’s daughter, Williams travelled widely throughout Europe when she wasn’t teaching in the art department at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. An incredibly active woman, she hiked and biked across Europe, while chafing against art world rules that favored men, and writing thousands of pages that record her travels and work. Her paintings offer remarkable horizon views of ancient ruins, medieval towns, country meadows, and calm waters. Her work was exhibited at various venues in the United States and France while she was still living. Much of her work has stayed in Connecticut and the Northeast, held by institutions including the Smith College Museum of Art, Connecticut Landmarks, and the Connecticut Historical Society.

Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857–1907, by Eve Kahn is a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. The book is up for the Bruce Fraser “Spirit of Connecticut” Award. Bruce Fraser, director of Connecticut Humanities for 28 years, was a proponent of Connecticut’s sense of place. He was interested in how places evoke memory and emotions from people, how people have such ferocious identification and loyalty to their surroundings and how the very landscape influences people. Mary Rogers Williams’ life and legacy embody the values of this award—Williams was deeply tied to, influenced by, and involved with her roots in Connecticut.

paiting

Green Landscape—Hills in the Distance (probably Connecticut
River Valley), 1903 pastel, 12 ½ x 22 in. Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, MA, gift of the sisters of Mary Rogers
Williams

Until recently, little was known or remembered about Williams. But in 2012, the artist’s confessional letters as well as hundreds of her paintings and sketches turned up in storage at a Connecticut family’s home. The resulting book reveals her as strong, funny, self-deprecating, caustically critical of mainstream art, and observant of everything from soldiers’ epaulettes to colorful produce layered on delivery trucks. She was determined to paint portraits and landscapes in her distinctive style—and so she did. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks that capture pensive gowned women, Norwegian slopes reflected in icy waters, saw-tooth rooflines on French chateaus, and incense hazes in Italian chapels. Forever Seeing New Beauties offers a vivid portrayal of an adventurer, defying her era’s expectations on a tight budget. Today we remember Mary Rogers Williams for her standout style, adventurous personality, and bold wit.

The author, Eve Kahn, will be lecturing on the book for Boston Design Week, on October 14th, in remote event. Learn more and register here. 

papers

Some of Mary Rogers Williams’ letters and papers. Photo by Eve Kahn.

 

 

Two Wesleyan UP books finalists for Connecticut Book Awards

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We are thrilled that two Wesleyan titles are honored by the Connecticut Center for the Book as finalists for 2020 Connecticut Book Awards. Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas is a finalist in the nonfiction category. And  Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Roger Williams, 1957–1907 is a finalist for the 2020 Spirit of Connecticut category. Congratulations!

Connecticut Center for the Book is the state affiliate of the national Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Our mission is to promote the written and spoken word throughout the state, and to foster a love of reading for the people of Connecticut.

As we all know, times have changed drastically, and the formerly live annual celebration hosted by the Connecticut Center for the Book will now be virtual. The ceremony will be held virtually on October 15, 2020, starting at 6:00 p.m. Winners will be announced at that time. You may register for the Connecticut Book Awards here.

We also extend our congratulations to Elizabeth Normen and David K. Leff, who are also finalists for the Spirit of Connecticut award. Normen co-edited African American Connecticut Explored and Leff authored Hidden in Plain Sight and Maple Sugaring.