Publicity

Honoring Veterans of Connecticut and Beyond

by selliott • November 11, 2015

Connecticut Veterans

The Battle of Antietam, pictured here, claimed over 22,000 casualties in one day. Years later, a soldier remembered: “for the six months following everything I ate drank or smelled had an odor of dead men in it and the memory of the scene and the place and the four trees that stood in the field to mark the place of burial will never be effaced.” (Manuscript of William Relyea, pp. 54–55, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.) From Heroes for All Time.

Nurse Harriet Ward Foote Hawley, who hailed from Connecticut wrote of her charge: “I can’t let them die—if they do a piece of my life dies too.” From Heroes for All Time.

Connie Nappier, Jr., Tuskegee Airman and native of Connecticut, c. 1944–1945. Courtesy of Connie Nappier and The Veterans Oral History Project at Central Connecticut State University (40-1, p308) From African American Connecticut Explored.

Wesleyan poets who served in WWII and the Vietnam War

Left: The late Harvey Shapiro earned a Distinguished Flying Cross serving as a B-17 tail gunner during WWII.
Right: Yusef Komunyakaa earned a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, working as a specialist for the military paper Southern Cross.

#tbt: Readings Across Time & Space with the Ancestors

by agansley • October 15, 2015

On November 29th, 1781, somewhere between the coast of West Africa and the island of Jamaica, some 150 enslaved Africans were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean on orders of the captain of the ship Zong. The book length poem, Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, was written entirely from the words of the legal decision regarding this massacre. This legal document is the only extant public document related to the massacre. Participatory and ritual, Zong! is an interplay between noise and silence. It performs, even as it seemingly unperforms, ideas of history and memory.

On November 29th, 2013, those who lost their lives aboard Zong were remembered with readings in Toronto, Brazil, Tobago, Trinidad, Blomfontein, and in New York at Unnameable books. Participants were invited to the sacred a space where ancestral voices join with voices of the living. The exchange was facilitated through spoken word, music, video, movement and improvisation, creating a polyvocal, counterpointed soundscape. View a video of one of the events here.

You can catch M. NourbeSe Philip at Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel this evening, where she will be joined Wesleyan’s own Gina Athena Ulysse for an evening of poetry-based performances.

The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory

#tbt: “The Hidden Musicians” revisited

by jgagne • October 8, 2015

January 11th–12th, 2016, Open University in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom will hold a conference surrounding The Hidden Musicians by Ruth Finnegan, who is a music professor at the university. More information about this event can be found at here.

The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, was originally published in 1989, but was reprinted by the Wesleyan University Press in 2007. The book is comprised of various studies by Professor Finnegan who studied the practices of amateur musicians and music ensembles in the small English town of Milton Keynes. She studied the differences and distinctions between what makes a band ‘professional’ or ‘amateur’, seen through the lens of professional and candid photographs taken at rehearsals and musical events, as seen below.

_{above: The eighty-year-old Wolverton Town and British Rail Band. The current members in their band uniform.}

_{Above: An informal photograph of the Woburn Sands Band shortly after competing in the National Brass Band Finals, showing the age range typical of many music groups (here 11 to 70).}

The book also explores the different genres of music made in the town, comparing the different rock bands, musical theatre ensembles, and variations of marching bands and community bands in the town. Through this, Finnegan creates a new methodology of studying music and how music is made and performed as seen throughout the book’s illustrations and its resonance within the musical academia of Open University.

Outside of Milton Keynes, amateur bands and musicians like those of the small English town, have continued to flourish throughout the years upon the same premises of being communal, casual, and organized by camaraderie. In the Wesleyan University Press office, our director, Suzanna Tamminen, below, spends her lunch hour practicing her tuba for her community band.

NourbeSe Philip & Gina Ulysse team up!

by selliott • October 5, 2015

Atlantic Reasonings Between Caribbean Sisters
Performances by M. NourbeSe Philip and Gina Athena Ulysse
October 15th, 7:30PM in Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel.

Two Wesleyan Press authors, M. NourbeSe Phlip and Gina Athena Ulysse are teaming up for an evening of powerhouse performances sponsored in large part by Wesleyan’s own Center for the Americas, with a additional support from our English Department’s Concentration in Creative Writing. Other funders include the Andrew W. Melon Fund for Lectures in Ethics; Center for the Arts; Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; the English Department’s Concentration in Creative Writing; Office of Equity & Inclusion; and Romance Languages & Literatures.

Please, also join us on October 14th, 4:15 PM, in Russell House, for a conversation between M. NourbeSe Philip and Indira Karamcheti–who will discuss Caribbean diasporas, the arts, race and self-care, followed by an open Q&A with audience members.

About the artists:

Gina Athena Ulysse is a performance artist, anthropologist, and author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, Downtown Ladies, and Haiti, me & THE WORLD.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, lawyer, and author of She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Zong!. Her essay collections include A Genealogy of Resistance and Showing Grit.

Respond to the Facebook invite here.

#tbt: Kazim Ali, “Bright Felon Deleted Scene 3”

by tsjohnson • October 1, 2015

This week’s selection for Throw Back Thursday is “Bright Felon Deleted Scene 3” from Kazim Ali’s collection Sky Ward (2013). It contains its own “throwback,” a reference to Bright Felon, Ali’s 2009 book.

Ali reinvents possibilities for the personal lyric and narrative in his writing. While in Bright Felon, he works through exile and criminality, Sky Ward weaves a story of mythology with the daily trials of life that we all know intimately. The lines between the ethereal and mundane are blurred.

This poem, from Sky Ward, is a “Deleted Scene” of sorts, from Bright Felon.

Bright Felon Deleted Scene 3

Amelia looking at photographs of my vacation says, “There are no
people in them!”

There are only mountains, clouds, empty streets, two pictures of
my back.

Unconfined in silence the sun is eclipsed.

In Dante’s Hell, him with my name is split neck to nave and stuffed
with maggots and grubs.

“You’re turning your back on people,” says Amelia.

But on the subway I steal glances at your ear, your cheek, your chin,
when I think you are not looking.

It’s not true, it’s to true. Your mouth, your hand, your ankle,
your thigh.

I am an inferno of fallen creatures, all wriggling for the light.

KAZIM ALI is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and translator. His books of poetry include The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, Bright Felon, and Sky Ward. Ali is an associate professor of creative writing and comparative literature at Oberlin College and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.

#tbt: “A Blessing,” by James Wright

by selliott • September 24, 2015

Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is a James Wright poem found in a forthcoming poetry collection for children: Book of Nature Poetry. The poem was originally published in Wright’s 1963 volume, The Branch Will Not Break, which is also available as an adorable mini-book.

“A Blessing”
by James Wright
from The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan UP, 1963)
Also found in The Book of Nature Poetry (National Geographic Society, 2015), from which this photograph was taken.

#tbt: Dennis Hinrichsen, “Autobiography”

by tsjohnson • September 3, 2015

This week’s selection for Throw Back Thursday is “Autobiography” from Dennis Hinrichsen’s Collection The Attraction of Heavenly Bodies (1983). His newest collection of poetry entitled Kurosawa’s Dog (2009) was published by the Oberlin College Press and is available through University Press of New England.

Autobiography

The city of my birth
is renowned for its mathematical
confusion of streets. Each day
they merge until they become like hands
that can only point in one cardinal direction at a time.
These all point down.
And there are always creatures lining up
on them, juggling their wares,
applying their make-up for the one or two lines
they will speak.
How to tell them their lives
have become as unassuming
as the underwater life or rivers and lakes:
hard to believe anything really exists there
except heat the the edges and weeds
until the random splash or swirl,
the exaggerated shouts of a fisherman
as he hauls a forty-pound catfish,
one of this earth’s truly ugly creatures,
out of the river.
They will insist, I know,
on auditioning in ill-lit rooms,
reciting from memory the exits and entrances
they have loved.
How to tell them I’ve moved.
How to inform them of the growing similarities
between the cities of our country and the country.
It would make them a little nervous,
I know, and unsure
of their professions.
They would stop repeating each other
the famous stories they keep
and begin on themselves—
always a little out of sync yet touching,
like antibodies
relegated to the inner rooms.
I can’t go in there.

DENNIS HINRICHSEN is the author of five collections of poetry; Kurosawa’s Dog, The Attraction of Heavenly Bodies, The Rain That Falls This Far, Detail from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ and Cage of Water. He lives in Lansing, Michigan.

De Lavallade, Faison & Wilkinson reflect on Janet Collins & their careers

by selliott • September 1, 2015

Panelists include Carmen de Lavallade, George Faison, and Raven Wilkinson.

Sunday, September 20th 2PM
Barnes & Noble, 150 East 86th Street (86th & Lexington Ave.), New York, NY
212-369-2180

Moderated by author Yaël Tamar Lewin, to celebrate the paperback edition of Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins.
A panel of renowned artists will reflect on Collins and her career, and discuss their own experiences as African-American performers in a racially segregated United States. There will also be a brief reading from the book and a screening of historical film clips.

Carmen de Lavallade is an award-winning dancer, choreographer, and actress. She performed with the Lester Horton Dance Theater and Alvin Ailey Dance Company and has appeared on Broadway (House of Flowers) and off (Othello, Death of a Salesman), as well as in film (Carmen Jones, Odds Against Tomorrow). Janet Collins was her first cousin and a great inspiration to de Lavallade, who danced some of her roles at the Metropolitan Opera. De Lavallade was also wife and dance partner to the late Geoffrey Holder.

George Faison is a celebrated dancer, choreographer, and producer who was the first African American to win a Tony Award for Best Choreography—which he received for The Wiz in 1975. He has also worked with popular entertainers such as Ashford & Simpson, Patti LaBelle, Dionne Warwick, and Earth, Wind & Fire. In addition, Faison is the artistic director of the Faison Firehouse Theater, a performing arts and cultural center that seeks to preserve Harlem’s historic past.

Raven Wilkinson was the first African-American dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which she joined in 1955, becoming a soloist in her second season. When performing in the American South, she wore white makeup to conceal her race. After her identity was revealed, she faced threats from the KKK. She left the company in 1961 and went on to work with the Dutch National Ballet and New York City Opera.

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/504146629740543/

#tbt: Young Union “Soldiers”

by selliott • August 20, 2015

Today’s Throwback Thursday images are from the book Heroes for all Time: Connecticut Civil War Soldiers Tell Their Stories. These photographs depict two rather young Union “soldiers”.

The name of boy on the left has been lost to history. He was most likely a former slave who sought shelter with Union soldiers. Many such boys and young men became servants to Union soldiers—cooking, washing clothes, cutting wood, and tending to gear. Some traveled North after the close of the war, to continue working as attendants in the homes of returning soldiers. On the right is Robert Morton, who worked as a servant for Union soldier Robert Potter during the war. As with many African American people who hired themselves to Union soldiers, little is known of his life.

Nationwide, and in Connecticut, Sesquicentennial Commemorations of the Civil War are Winding Down.
Wesleyan author Matthew Warshauer has played a large role in the Commemoration efforts here in Connecticut. He is co-chair ofthe Connecticut Civil War Commemoration Commission, author of Connecticut in the American Civil War, and editor of Inside Connecticut and the Civil War. The authors of Heroes for All Time will be at both of the Connecticut events listed below, answering questions about Connecticut soldiers and signing copies of their book—which if full of interesting stories such as those of the two boys photographed above.

August 29th & 30th
After four years of amazing events and an impressive range of new scholarship and understanding of Connecticut’s important role in the Civil War, the Civil War Commemoration is coming to a close during the last weekend of August, 2015. You can join the Connecticut Civil War Commemoration Commission at scenic Bauer Park (Madison, CT) for the final Commission sponsored encampment of the 150th anniversary commemoration. The event will feature hundreds of re-enactors and displays. Be there for the last great battle on Saturday and the official closing ceremonies on Sunday. You can find more information here.

September 12th
Join the Middlesex County Historical Society for a day of history, music, and remembrance in the back yard of the General Mansfield House. The featured speaker will be Edward Ball, acclaimed author of Slaves in the Family, winner of the National Book Award. Tom Callinan, Connecticut’s first State Troubadour, will be on hand to sing popular songs from the Civil War era, as well as original compositions. Re-enactors will portray civilians and soldiers from Company F of the 14th CVI. They will demonstrate camp life including drills, cooking over campfires, and other activities necessary to the operation of an army of the period. You can find more information here.

Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins

by selliott • August 14, 2015

Janet Collins (1917–2003) was a renowned dancer, painter, and the first African-American soloist ballerina to appear on the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It took her many years of resolve, facing the blatant racism that existed in the dance community (as it did elsewhere in the United States), to achieve the status of prima ballerina at the Met. In fact, at age 15 she was offered a position with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with the caveat that she would “paint her face white.” Collins declined. But she did not give up.

Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins, recipient of the Marfield Prize,
the National Award for Arts Writing, and now available in paperback.
The first two chapters are comprised of Collins’s unfinished autobiography.

The black dancing body was welcome on American and European stages of the mid-twentieth century, but usually only in forms of popular entertainment that perpetuated African-American stereotypes: the comic, the streetwise, and the exotic primitive. These stereotypical characters were found in minstrel shows and vaudeville, as well as on Broadway and in Hollywood movies. Pioneers like Edna Guy, Hemsley Winfield, and Katherine Dunham paved the way for African-American dancers in the arena of Modern dance, but the world of ballet remained closed, its movement vocabulary deemed too refined for black performers. In addition to the stereotypes of being too raw, too sensual, and too primal, blacks also had to contend with an irrational judgment of their physiques. White dance directors and choreographers deemed the black dancing physique as incompatible with ballet’s technical and aesthetic demands, assuming that they somehow lacked the grace and precision necessary to succeed in ballet.

Night’s Dancer tells the story of Janet Collins, who helped to pave the way for positive change in the dance world. She remains an inspiration today, due to her artistry, courage, and perseverance. Biographer Yaël Tamar Lewin, who is also a dancer, does not shy away from the darker corners of her life. Lewin discusses Collins’s battle with depression, the sterilization she underwent as a young woman, and the hard-hitting rejection she faced because of her skin color. Lewin does not merely focus on Collins’s long struggle to break the race barrier. Drawing on extensive research as well as interviews with Collins, her family, friends, and colleagues, Lewin chronicles her life as a well-rounded and accomplished artist, a true pioneer in her choreographic work. Collins fused styles, topics, and music in new ways. She also was a talented painter.

Wesleyan University Press is not alone in recognizing the talents and achievements of Janet Collins. She is also the subject of Dancing in the Light: The Janet Collins Story, a new short animated film narrated by Chris Rock and produced by Karyn Parsons for Sweet Blackberry. Carmen de Lavallade, an accomplished dancer, choreographer, and Yale University professor, is working on a feature film about her talented cousin. De Lavallade is collaborating with actress/producer Roberta Haynes and writer Jenny Callicott on the film, Prima: The Janet Collins Story. Their website explains: “So many events in today’s news remind us that it is increasingly important to remember the struggles of the civil rights movement.” And asks: “[W]hy is it that Janet Collins’ amazing accomplishment of becoming the first black prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera a story that remains untold?”

Collins’s story is still very relevant. In her memoir, Misty Copeland (now principal dancer at American Ballet Theater) noted that “[t]here were many people who seemed not to want to see black ballerinas, who thought that our very presence made ballet less authentic, less romantic, less true. The bitter truth is I felt that I wasn’t being fully accepted because I was black, that leaders of the company just didn’t see me starring in more classical roles, despite my elegant line and flow.” Collins was among a small, dedicated group of black dancers who helped pave a difficult road for talents such as Copeland.

Janet Collins has been widely recognized as one of the finest dancers in America. Her artistic and personal influences continue to shape the dance world today, not only due to her perseverance, but also due to her great talent and creativity as a dancer and artist.

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. Featured image: Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy of the Van Vechten Trust and the Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.