Publicity

Telling Janet Collins’ story

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Janet Collins, renowned dancer, painter, and the first African-American soloist ballerina to appear at the Metropolitan Opera, remains largely under-recognized. Actress and mother Karyn Parsons, who played Hilary Banks in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, hopes to remedy this by sharing Collins’ story with those to whom it might be most important—children.

 

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Karyn created a Kickstarter campaign, which closes on July 18th, to fund the project. Donors will receive all manner of exciting prizes. There are signed posters, photographs, and books; chances to have a voicemail message recorded by Chris Rock or Jada Pinkett Smith; even opportunities to meet Rock or members of the cast of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

You can also select Welseyan’s book on Janet Collins, Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins by Yaël Tamar Lewin. As Collins wrote in her unfinished memoir, included in Night’s Dancer, her life was full of  “great thrills—and great chills.” Janet was born in 1917 to a poor but educated family in New Orleans. The family moved to Los Angeles soon after her birth, as her mother wanted to live in a place where her children “could go anywhere they wanted to, particularly the library.”

Janet’s talents became apparent at a young age, but as a black woman in the entirely white world of dance, she faced prejudice. At age fifteen she was offered a spot in the prestigious company Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, but only if she agreed to perform in whiteface. She refused. Later, she was unable to tour in the Jim Crow South.

Collins went on to star in Aida and Carmen, and eventually graced the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, its first black prima ballerina. Since then, she has been widely recognized as one of the finest dancers in America. Her artistic and personal influences continue to shape the dance world today.

It’s an important story, one that is sure to inspire todays young people. Visit the Kickstarter page to contribute. The campaign has garnered attention from BET, The Guardian, and NPR.

Photo credits, all found in Night’s Dancer: 1 & 2: Collins in Spirituals. Photo @ Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 3: Painting of a young girl by Collins. Courtesy of the estate of Janet Collins. 4: Painting of a woman with magnolias by Collins. Courtesy of the estate of Janet Collins. 5: Collins with Hanya Holm, Don Redlick, and Elizabeth Harris, 1961. Photo by Bob McIntyre. Courtesy of Don Redlich. 6: Collins surrounded by her art. Betty Udesen/The Seattle Times.

#tbt: Rachel Zucker, “Letter [Persephone to Hades]”

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This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is Rachel Zucker’s “Letter [Persephone to Hades]” from Eating in the Underworld (2003), a re-imagining of Greek myth. Both spare and lyrical, the poems are written as entries in Persephone’s diary and as letters between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. Zucker also features in a recent New Yorker article by Dan Chiasson.

 

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LETTER [PERSEPHONE TO HADES]

A city grows up to house millions;
cherished fields destroyed willingly.

The surface is carved over and over in names.

Some call it love, some obligation—
though neither true, we pile up and prosper.

Won, like a trinket, I obey and am nothing.
Hear?—she calls me:

from other rooms, across deep rivers,
complains I’m never where she left me.

She forbids me meadows, untilled prairies for fear
I’ll find the lower whose hundred stems grow from one root.

So I keep to the craggy enclaves, outside watchfulness:
mountains, shores, places which sustain no vegetation—

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RACHEL ZUCKER is the author of nine books, most recently, a memoir, MOTHERs, and a double collection of prose and poetry, The Pedestrians. Her book Museum of Accidents was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013. Zucker teaches poetry at New York University.

#tbt: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “Worn Blues Refrain”

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This week’s TBT selection is “Worn Blues Refrain,” from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ 2003 collection Outlandish Blues. Wesleyan is publishing her book, The Glory Gets, in Spring 2015.

 

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Worn Blues Refrain

My father danced on Saturday mornings,
turned his fat professor’s legs the wrong way.
No rhythm self, tripping over Mama’s corns,
his jitterbug like a worn blues refrain.
Then the afternoons, he sat himself down
to the piano, knee pants memories
of Louis and his trumpet come to town.
Louis didn’t crack a smile. Don’t believe?
Want to dispute it? Dad didn’t think so
and commenced with Jelly Roll religion.
Those porcelain hours, demons stopped poking
my father. From someplace close he found love.
He got some rhythm when he played the blues,
hollered and touched us all without bruising.

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HONOREÉ FANONNE JEFFERS  is the author of three books of poems, including Red Clay Suite (2007), Outlandish Blues (2003) and The Gospel of Barbecue (2000). Her next book, The Glory Gets, will be published by Wesleyan in Spring 2015. Her other honors include the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry for her first book and the 2002 Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, as well as awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Rona Jaffe Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A founding member of Cave Canem, the writer’s colony for African-American poets, Jeffers teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she is Associate Professor of English.

#tbt: Peter Gizzi, “The ethics of dust”

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This week’s TBT selection is Peter Gizzi’s “The Ethics of Dust” from Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003). You can find a review of Peter’s latest book, In Defense of Nothing, in the July/August issue of Boston Review.

 

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The ethics of dust

to think I have written this poem before
to think to say the reason I came here
sound of yard bird, clinking lightbulb

to think the world has lasted this long

what were we hoping to say:
ailanthus, rosebud, gable
saturnalia, moonglow, remember

I am on the other side now
have crossed the river, have
through much difficulty
come to you from a dormer closet
head full of dark
my voice in what you say

at this moment you say
wind through stone, through teeth
through falling sheets, flapping geese

 every thing is poetry here

a vast blank fronting the eyes
more sparkling than sun on brick
October’s crossing-guard orange

 

 

PETER GIZZI is the author of Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, Periplum, and In Defense of Nothing. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

#tbt: Phillip Levine, “Commanding Elephants”

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Last weeks’ #TBT poem was by the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Wright. This week’s poem is by our previous Poet Laureate, Philip Levine,

This week’s selection is “Commanding Elephants ” from Philip Levine’s Not This Pig (1968).

 

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COMMANDING ELEPHANTS

Lonnie said before this, “I’m
the chief of the elephants,
I call the tunes and they dance.”
From his bed he’d hear the drum

of hooves in the bricked alley
and the blast of the Sheenie
calling for rags, wood, paper,
glass—all that was left over—

and from this he’d tell the time.
Beside the bed on a chair
the clean work pants, on the door
the ironed work shirt with his name,

and in the bathroom father
than he could go in the hight-top
lace-up boots, the kind the scouts
wore and he’d worn since

he was twelve. To be asleep
hours after dawn, to have
a daughter in school when he
woke, a wife in the same shop

where he’d seen the foreman
and said Go, where he’d tripped
the columns of switches and
brought the slow elephant feet

of the presses sliding down
in grooves as they must still do
effortlessly for someone.
“Oh my body, what have you

done to me?” he never said.
His hands surprised him; smelling
of soap, they lay at his sides
as though they were listening.

 

PHILIP LEVINE has published many books of poetry – of which Not This Pig was his second – as well as translations of poetry from the Spanish. Among his many awards are the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the American Book Award, the National Book Award for Poetry, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has served as the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the 18th United States Poet Laureate. 

#TBT: “Delta Traveller” by our new Poet Laureate, Charles Wright

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It’s Throwback Thursday, and also a day to celebrate the United States’ new Poet Laureate: Charles Wright.

This week’s selection is “Delta Traveler,” from Charles Wright’s Country Music, Selected Early Poems. 

 

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Delta Traveller
—MWW, 1910–1964

Born in   the quarter-night, brash
Tongue on the tongueless ward, the moon down,
The lake rising on schedule and Dr Hurt
Already across the water, and headed home—
And so I came sailing out, first child,
A stream with no bed to lie in,
A root with no branch to leaf,
The black balloon of promise tied to your wrist,
One inch of pain and an inch of light.

*

No wonder the children stand by those moist graves.
And produce is spread on the cobbled streets,
And portraits are carried out, and horns play.
And women, in single file, untangle
Corn from the storage bins, and soft cheese.
I shield my eyes against the sunlight,
Holding, in one hand, a death’s-head,
Spun sugar and marzipan. I call it Love,
And shield my eyes against the sunlight.

*

I lie down with you, I rise up with you.
If a grain turns in my eye,
I know it is you, entering, leaving,
You drift through the antilife,
Scrim and snow-scud, fluff stem, hair
And tendril. You bloom in your own throat,
Frost flame in the frost dust,
One scratch on the slipstream, a closed mouth.

*

High-necked and high-collared, slumped and creased,
A dress sits in a chair. Your dress,
Or your mother’s dress, a dress
On a wooden chair, in a cold room, a room
With no windows and no doors, full of the east wind.
The dress gets up, windbone and windskin,
To open the window. It is not there.
It goes to the door. It is not there.
The dress goes back and sits down. The dress gets up.

*

Three teeth and a thumbnail, white, white; four
Fingers that cradle a black chin;
Outline of eye-hole and nose-hole. This skull
And its one hand float up from the tar
And lime pit of dreams, night after slick night,
To lodge in the fork of the gum tree,
Its three teeth in the leaflight,
Its thumbnail in flash and foil,
Its mouth-hole a nothing I need to know.

*

Cat’s-eye and cloud, you survive.
The porcelain corridors
That glide forever beneath your feet,
The armed lawn chair you sit in,
Your bones like paint, your skin the wrong color—
All this you survive, and hold on,
A way of remembering, a pulse
That comes and goes in the night,
Match flare and wink, that comes and goes in the night.

*

If the wafer of light offends me,
If the split tongue in the snake’s mouth offends me,
I am not listening. They make the sound,
Which is the same sound, of the ant hill,
The hollow trunk, the fruit of the tree.
It is the Echo, the one transmitter of things:
Transcendent and inescapable,
It is the cloud, the mosquito’s buzz,
The trickle of water across the leaf’s vein.

*

And so with the dead, the rock dead and the dust:
Worm and worm-fill, pearl, milk-eye
And light in the earth, the dead arc brought
Back to us, piece by piece—
Under the sponged log, inside the stump,
They shine with their secret lives, and grow
Big with their messages, wings
Beginning to stir, paths fixed and hearts clocked,
Rising and falling back and rising.

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Wesleyan University Press also published these books by Charles Wright: The Grave of the Right Hand (1963), Hard Freight (1970), Blood Lines (1973), and China Trace (1975).

Wesleyan Welcomes Books by J. A. Rogers

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“Perhaps his most unique achievement [was] the fact that with little more than a high school education, [Rogers] was able to perfect an orthodox history methodology.”
                                                 –Bilalian News, August 1976

The Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce that we are now distributing a collection of books by J.A. Rogers, originally published by Helga M. Rogers. Joel Augustus Rogers (1880–1966) was a Jamaican-American author, journalist, and a self-taught historian who made great contributions to the history of Africa and the African diaspora, with a focus on the history of African Americans in the United States. His research spanned the fields of history, sociology, and anthropology–challenging prevailing ideas about race and demonstrating a connection between civilizations. Rogers was instrumental in popularizing African history and tracing African achievements. He revolutionized the telling of African history by addressing the lack of science behind many assumptions about “race,” as well as the dearth of black historians researching and telling their own histories.

Wesleyan University Press  is now distributing eight of his titles: 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, Nature Knows No Color Line, Africa’s Gift to America, Sex and Race Volume 1, Sex and Race Volume 2, and Sex and Race Volume 3, The Five Negro Presidents, and From “Superman” to Man.

“Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire” wins 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize

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Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire is the International winner of the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize. The prize was founded in 2000 to serve and encourage excellence in poetry, and past winners have included eminent writers like Fady Joudah, John Ashbery, Kamau Brathwaite, Charles Simic, Paul Muldoon, and Alice Notley.

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This year, the judges—Robert Bringhurst, Jo Shapcott, and C.D. Wright—read 542 books of poetry from 40 countries. Seven books were shortlisted, and two winners chosen—one from Canada and one internationally. Hillman, Anne Carson ( the Canadian winner ), and shortlisted poets were celebrated at a June 4th reading, attended by a thousand people, at Koerner Hall Toronto’s Royal Conservatory; the awards ceremony was held the next evening.

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Scott Griffin presents the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize winners: Brenda Hillman and Anne Carson.

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Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire concludes Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy on the four elements of classical thought, following Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009), all published by Wesleyan. In their citation, the judges wrote:

“[Hillman] steers wildly but ably through another day of teaching, a ceremonial equinox, the distress of bee colony collapse; space junk, political obstruction, military drones, administrative headaches, and everything in between. The ‘newt under the laurel’ and ‘the herring purring through the eelgrass’ don’t escape her arc of acuity. Seasonal Works appears to be one of the most inclusive books a hyper-active imagination could wring out of the actual. The symbols of the alphabet come alive and perform acrobatic marvels. Phonetical bird calls join in on cue. The mighty challenges of now are fully engaged. The book performs an ‘anarchic music’ and stimulates a craving for undiluted love, and a rollicking fury for justice that only its widely variant forms can sustain. This is a unique work. Its letters are on fire.”

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and spent part of her early childhood in Brazil. After receiving her BA from Pomona College, she attended the University of Iowa, where she received her MFA. Wesleyan University Press has published nine collections of Hillman’s poetry, including Practical Water (2009), for which she was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. In 2010, Hillman co-translated Jeongrye Choi’s book of poems, Instances. Hillman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, two Pushcart Prizes, a Holloway Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry. Hillman serves as a professor and poet-in-residence at St. Mary’s College in Morago, California. She is also a member of the permanent faculties of Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She is an activist for social and environmental justice and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

#tbt: Adélia Prado, trans. Ellen Watson, “With Poetic License”

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If you’ve spent any time on the Internet lately, you already know about Throwback Thursday—an occasion for Tweeters, Instagrammers, and Facebookers to share with their audiences a glimpse of their past, a funny memory or a cute childhood photo.

We at WesPress thought we’d hop on this trend. After all, we have a long history—founded in 1957, with our first book published in 1959, we’ve been publishing great books for over half a century. So in honor of #tbt, we’ll be posting poems every Thursday drawn from older Wesleyan titles, including some author favorites.

This week’s selection is Adélia Prado’s “Poetic License,” translated by Ellen Watson, from The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado (1990). We would also like to congratulate Prado on her Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust.

 

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With Poetic License

When I was born, one of those svelte angels
who plays a trumpet proclaimed:
this one will carry a flag.
A heavy load for a woman,
even nowadays such a bashful species.
I accept the subterfuges that fit;
no need to lie.
I’m not so ugly that I can’t get married,
I think Rio’s a real knockout, and—
well, yes and no, I believe in childbirth without pain.
But what I feel, I write. I make good on the prophecies.
I establish lineages, whole kingdoms
(pain is not bitterness).
My sadness has no pedigree
but my longing for joy—
its root goes back a thousand generations.
It’s man’s curse to be lame in life,
woman’s to unfold. I do.

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ADÉLIA PRADO has authored eight volumes of poetry and seven volumes of literary prose in Portuguese. The first in her family of laborers to see the ocean or go to college, Prado has lived all her life in the provincial industrial city of Divinopolis in Minas Gerais, Brazil. She has degrees in Philosophy and Religious Education from the University of Divinópolis, and she worked for many years as a schoolteacher.

ELLEN DORÉ WATSON was hailed by Library Journal as one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Her collections of poetry include Ladder Music and We Live in Bodies (Alice James, 2001 and 2002), This Sharpening (Tupelo, 2006), and Dogged Hearts (Tupelo, 2010). She has also translated a dozen books. She is the Poetry and Translation Editor for The Massachusetts Review and the director of The Poetry Center at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Gerald Vizenor on the road in support of Blue Ravens and Favor of Crows

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Gerald Vizenor, arguably the most prolific Native American author of our time, is on the road sharing his knowledge with audiences far and wide. After events in New York City and Minneapolis, he is gearing up for a series of readings and lectures that will take him to several European destinations and Japan in support of his new books: Blue Ravens, a groundbreaking, fact based novel of Anishinaabe soldiers in WWI,  and Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. 

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First he will visit King’s College of London, where he will lead a masterclass on Native American Indians in the First World War and give a public lecture on Literary Transmotion: Native American Indian Literature of Survivance. Then, Gerald will be off to Paris, reading from his new books at Galerie Orenda, where artwork by Tony Abeyta (Navajo) and Brenda Kingery (Chickasaw) is on display in an exhibit titled “Rhythms and Colors of Native America.” The next stop is the University of Vienna, for the conference “Native North American Survivance and Memory: Celebrating Gerald Vizenor.”  This is the first gathering of its kind, offering a systematic look at Vizenor’s poetic, fictional, theoretical, and juridical writing.  Finally, Gerald will spend time in Japan, presenting his work in a series of lectures for audiences at Keio University and at the American Center Japan. We thank Kinokuniya Bookstore for providing books at these events. 

Stay tuned…when Gerald returns to the United States he will make some stops in New England. Those details are forthcoming. 

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Photographs from Vizenor’s visit to NMAI in New York City. Clockwise from top left: in Central Park; with esteemed artist Robert Houle, who provided artwork for Favor of Crows; signing copies of his books after the panel discussion; with his wife, Laura Hall.  Photographs courtesy of Laura Hall.