Subjects

Celebrating 10 Years of “Night’s Dancer” by Yaël Tamar Lewin

by sbazarian • September 13, 2021

September 13, 2021, marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins, by dance scholar Yaël Tamar Lewin, referred to as a “must-read” by Charmaine Warren in her Amsterdam News review. It chronicles the life of an extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet—the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera.

The book opens with Collins’s unfinished memoir, which gives a captivating account of her childhood and young adult years, including her rejection by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo—based on Collins’s refusal to whiten her face. Lewin then picks up the thread of Collins’s story, drawing on extensive research and interviews to explore Collins’s development as a dancer, choreographer, and painter, giving us a profoundly moving portrait of an artist of indomitable spirit in an era in which racial bias prevailed. The book contains 65 illustrations, including 49 photographs as well as 16 color plates of Collins and her visual artwork.

Winner of the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing, from the Arts Club of Washington, Night’s Dancer reveals that Collins’s brilliant performances transformed how African-American dancers were perceived in the world of ballet, making way for future ballet dancers of color. The 70th anniversary of her historic debut at the Metropolitan Opera will be celebrated on November 13, 2021.

Yaël Tamar Lewin is a dance historian, writer, and dancer living in New York City.

Praise for Night’s Dancer

“Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins is an enthralling read. It reinforces Collins’s struggle, personal strength and ultimate success. While following her dreams with endless energy, she leapt over boundaries.”
—Karen Barr, Dance International

“Much of Collins’s career is lost in the gaps of performance history, and Lewin has done wonders to restore to the record the work of this pioneering woman, as well as printing Collins’s forty-odd pages of reminiscences for the first time… Night’s Dancer is a fine contribution both to dance history and the history of segregation in the United States.”
—Judith Flanders, Times Literary Supplement

“With Night’s Dancer, Lewin has produced a major work that continues to correct the absence of historical writing on African Americans in ballet and modern dance. The author incorporates Collins’s own writings, intimate details from the artist’s life, and rich contextual material to create a work that is emotionally touching and incredibly informative.”
—John O. Perpener III, author of African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

“Blessed with extraordinary gifts for dance and painting, Janet Collins broke barriers as the first African-American prima ballerina at the world-renowned Metropolitan Opera. Her life’s journey is inspirational. History should recognize her as one of its pioneers. Janet Collins was truly one of earth’s angels.”
—Arthur Mitchell, co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem

“Psychologists, sociologists, historians, painters, dancers, choreographers—here is your book! This is a careful, objective, revealing study of a complex and enigmatic person. Collins was richly blessed with creative talents and deeply drawn to a spiritual life. Night’s Dancer explores her struggle to fulfill and be fulfilled. A scholarly, beautiful, important work, and long overdue.”
—Raven Wilkinson, first African-American dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo

Celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride

by mkolson • June 4, 2021

Pride Month (June) commemorate the Stonewall Riots which took place in Greenwich Village in late June 1969. The Stonewall Riots were a series of spontaneous demonstrations by members of the LGBTQ+ community in response to a police raid against the Stonewall Inn. When the police became violent, patrons of the Stonewall and members of the larger Village community fought back. Today, Stonewall is considered one of the most important events in the lead-up to the Gay Liberation Movement and the modern fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States.

To celebrate, we share with you a Wesleyan University Press Pride Reading List. These titles are by LGBTQ+ authors or detail an important aspect of LGBTQ+ history and culture. The LGBTQ+ community has made immense contributions and these texts are just one way in which we can see that influence. We are proud to support LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and stories—during June and always.

New and Forthcoming

Once in a blue moon, a love like this comes along….

“The poems in Magnified model a fearless relation with lost beloveds that is gorgeous, queer and fiercely alive. Minnie Bruce Pratt, who always writes verse with palpating radical breath, here ignites it with a vision for revolutionary afterlife.”
—Rachel Levitsky, author of The Story of My Accident Is Ours

Magnified is a collection of love poems drawing us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens “to swivel out and magnify” the beauty in “the little glints, insignificant” that catch her eye.

Essays and occasional writings from one of literature’s iconic voices

“By turns gutsy and erudite, challenging and gracious, Delany’s Occasional Views gives illuminating glances of his mind’s life journey. How lucky we are to have these proofs of the resonant truths he has discovered along the way!”
—Nisi Shawl, author of Everfair

Essays, lectures, and interviews address topics such as 9/11, race, the garden of Eden, the interplay of life and writing, and notes on other writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Hart Crane, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hölderlin, and an introduction to—and a conversation with—Octavia E. Butler.

Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American master

“Have you read a poet and suddenly feel the shoulders you stand on? Jack Spicer does this to many of us, and now there are more poems! Oh, more treasure! Magic is not a metaphor, and ‘Time does not finish a poem.’ Jack says, ‘Like a herd of reindeer / No one knows your heart.”
—CAConrad

Includes major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended “books” and serial poems. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer’s growing readership to savor and enjoy.

Recent & Backlist

Featured books:

Magnified by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Un-American by Hafizah Geter

bury it by sam sax

Music & Camp by Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis

Inquisition by Kazim Ali

Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making by Fiona Buckland

Occasional Views Volume 1: “More About Writing” and Other Essays by Samuel R Delany

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer

How Reading Is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein by Astrid Lorange

Same-Sex Marriage: The Legal and Psychological Evolution in America by Donald J. Cantor, Elizabeth Cantor, James C. Black, and Campbell D. Barrett

“Un-American”, “Conjure”, and “The Age of Phillis” Longlisted for 2021 PEN Book Awards

by cherrera • December 22, 2020

We congratulate Hafizah Geter, Rae Armantrout, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who are all Longlisted for awards from PEN America.

Hafizah Geter’s debut poetry collection, Un-American, is Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. The PEN Open Book Award honors a work of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, or poetry written by an author of color. The award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.

Geter’s collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you.

We are also pleased to announce that Rae Armantrout’s Conjure and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis are both Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. The PEN/Voelcker Award honors a distinguished collection of poetry that represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.

Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers an increasingly toxic world.

The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade.

From PEN America’s press release:

The Longlists for its 2021 Literary Awards span 11 book awards and encompassing more than 125 writers and translators, representing the year’s most extraordinary literary talents. Over 80 judges have selected the Longlists, which are made up of categories including the novel, short story collection, translation, poetry, science writing, essay, biography, and more. (Read the full release here.)

Finalists for PEN America Literary Awards will be announced in February 2021.

Remembering Veterans Day through Poetry

by cherrera • November 11, 2020

Announcing “Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems” by Alfred Arteaga

by gsanford • October 7, 2020

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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.

Announcing “The Grand Union”

by sbazarian • September 8, 2020

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The Grand Union was a leaderless improvisation group in SoHo in the 1970s that included people who became some of the biggest names in postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, and Douglas Dunn. Together they unleashed a range of improvised forms from peaceful movement explorations to wildly imaginative collective fantasies. This book delves into the “collective genius” of Grand Union and explores their process of deep play—before they became known as pillars of postmodern dance. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes and dozens of interviews, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances in both physical and emotional terms. What were the elements of their uncanny synergy? To what extent did their performing selves reveal their real, everyday selves? During the period when artists of different disciplines were redefining art, the Grand Union contributed to this experimentation by questioning the conventions of concert dance. The book includes 65 photographs.

“I didn’t know how much I needed this book in my library until now. It is so alive, a beautifully researched book, giddily holding and challenging the myth. A band of dance anarchists that left no choreographic traces but changed almost everything that has been danced in contemporary dance since. One of these artists and one of my teachers, Barbara Dilley, calls Grand Union her ‘art mother.’ I call the writing and dance giants documented (and imagined) an art book triumph.” —Ralph Lemon, choreographer

“An articulate writer, Perron witnessed much of Grand Union’s history, and has spent fifty years thinking deeply about the issues it raises. Her book is a great gift to the dance field, and to cultural studies in general.”
—Elizabeth Zimmer, Guest Artist, Hollins University MFA Program in Dance

Wendy Perron is a former dancer/choreographer and current writer and teacher. A former editor-in-chief of Dance magazine, she is the author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings.

Wesleyan University Press’ Antiracist Reading Lists!

by mkolson • August 18, 2020

To celebrate the continuous struggle for freedom and equality in America, Wesleyan University Press has compiled a few antiracist reading lists in order to amplify BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices, experiences, and histories. Below are just a few of the fantastic titles Wesleyan University Press has published by BIPOC authors or about the Black historical legacy. Poetry, music and dance, autobiography, science fiction, historical novels, and more show the breadth of these lyrical, literary, and scholarly contributions. We are dedicated to supporting Black authors and stories, to listening and learning through publishing and reading. This moment is highlighting just how much work there is to be done in order to dismantle systemic racism in our country; these books help show us why that work is so important and how we can begin to integrate it into our daily lives and reading practices. Black lives matter!

To order books and view our full list of titles, please visit https://www.hfsbooks.com/publishers/wesleyan-university-press/ or click on the below cover images to visit a book page directly. And don’t forget to look out for Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times edited by Christina Baade and Kristin McGee– forthcoming in Spring 2021!

The following list includes poetry, science fiction, historical novels, and non-fiction.

A Hubert Harrison Reader

Five Black Lives

African American Connecticut Explored

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof

The Little Edges by Fred Moten	The Book of Landings by Mark McMorris	Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
Un-American by Hafizah Geter	The Lazarus Poems by Kamau Brathwaite	Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa
The Peacock Poems by Sherley Anne Williams	semiautomatic by Evie Shockley	In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
To See the Earth Before the End of the World by Ed Roberson	Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha by Ananya Chatterjea	Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers	Fela: Kalakuta Notes by John Collins	The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas
Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae by Michael E. Veal	Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle by Gina Athena Ulysse	Come home Charley Patton by Ralph Lemon
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by Tricia Rose	The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory by Anne Farrow	The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany
How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy	Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor	In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo

“Public Figures” Revisited

by sbazarian • June 29, 2020

The topic of monuments and memorialization of historical figures has been a point of contention in the United States. We recall the removal of confederate statues in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, resulting in retaliation from violent white supremacist groups. In more recent news, the removal of similar statues has swept the nation after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Riah Milton, and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells. As protests against police brutality occur in states across the nation, calls for the removal of statues that stand as symbols of racism and oppression have increased. Some monuments, such as one of Christopher Columbus in Boston and Thomas Jefferson in Portland, have been physically removed by frustrated people demanding a more accurate recognition of American history.

Many of these Civil War-related statues were erected long after the war, in the early 20th century. This fact might leave one to ponder, what was the intention of honoring Confederate military leaders in the early 20th century?

Jena Osman’s book Public Figures examines the monuments and statues of Philadelphia, pondering each statue’s literal “view” on the city as well as the embedded history within their creation and placement. As the book progresses, including photographs of various figures, the common theme remains of militarism and pride in the state. Regardless of the historical context of a statue, whether it be a Civil War soldier or a replica of a classical Greek statue, weaponry including guns, swords, spears, and grenades are attached to the hands and arms of these iron men. Many are dressed in military uniform, differentiating them from the civilian life of the passersby.

Osman ponders what we do and do not notice as we move about our lives. Does our oblivious walk past such statues parallel our nation’s ability to ignore the deadly work of state-sanctioned violence and indicate an implicit acceptance of our country’s racist history? What kind of message do statues symbolizing slave owners and colonizers send to communities of color? And why must these communities accept these statues looming over their daily lives?

When you next find yourself in a public space, take a look around at the monuments and art placed there. Ponder what the intended message is.

To learn more about Public Figures, check out our Reader’s Companion. Teachers might find these classroom exercises useful, including a research project for students to investigate their local “public figures.”

Human Signs Ensemble includes Wesleyan author and professor Hari Krishnan

by sbazarian • June 25, 2020

HUMAN SIGNS is a series of audiovisual ensembles created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Its creator, Yuval Avital, describes its premise:

“HUMAN SIGNS unites great protagonists of the contemporary dance and Ballet scene, vocal soloists from all around the globe, including carriers of ancient traditions, contemporary and experimental pioneers, religious representatives from every faith. All united in a participatory art project that from Milan connects the entire world to share – at the times of COVID-19 – the HUMAN SIGNS, presented online through a series of weekly audiovisual creations (every Tuesday at this link)–each one introduced by a different curator–interpreting the viral aesthetic as a multimedia choir of vulnerability, spirituality, inner strength, hopes and fears.”

HUMAN SIGNS’ 7th edition ensemble includes Wesleyan author and professor Hari Krishnan. His dialogue/vignette is from 40:26- 52:20.

Read Dr. Krishnan’s statement on his work, “Life on Pause–A Meditation”.

“Being part of this artistic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, was a truly evocative, moving, revealing journey for me. I had to sit, still, in my dark bedroom, retreat within myself, and distill the restless, helpless despair my physical self and soul embodied in this fractured, tumultuous time. After two weeks of introspection, in the friendly company of the Cantus Firmus mantra and the sunrise as a healing balm, I let my mind, body and heart express my inner world through this ‘dance’. Drawing from my rich Indian dance ethos, I carefully abstracted from the structure of mezzuvani–a seated salon solo dance style where the dancer performs with mudras (hand gestures) and abhinaya (facial expressions).

“As I choreographed, using Covid-19 as the premise, current political events collided with my (already) altered realties, i.e. the police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement protests in the U.S. In homage, I empathized with my marginalized friends, by referencing BLM’s symbol of resistance–the raised clenched fist–in the beginning of my solo to join in solidarity with them.

“Reflecting the context of isolation and depletion in my current life, I radically edited all the staples I take for granted as an Indian dancer–the complex footwork, layered multiple mudras, theatrical abhinaya, elaborate costumes, jewelry, make-up, etc. Hence my minimalist iteration. As a metaphor for the quarantine, I “locked-down” my dancing legs by immobilizing them in the Padmasana (yogic lotus seated) position. While my left hand ‘stops’ loneliness, angst, dissonance, sorrow, hurt and fear at the outer prakaram (perimeter), my right hand’s index finger, quantifying a singular prayer, invites the healing sun into my darkened soul to bathe it in light and cleanse it with warmth. My centered, gently undulating torso, and circling hands welcome the spirit of a Higher Power to take residence in and transform the ‘chaotic beauty’ within my soul garbha griha (sanctum sanctorum) into Ananda (Bliss)….”

Hari Krishnan Krishnan is an internationally respected and award-winning choreographer, professional Bharatanātyam dancer, educator, and writer. His research interests span a range of topics, including queer subjectivities in South Asian and global dance performance, colonialism, post-colonialism and Indian dance, and the history of devadasi (courtesan) dance traditions in South India. Krishnan is also the artistic director of Toronto-based dance company inDANCE. As an award winning dance maker, he is commissioned internationally for his bold and transgressive choreography. Also an associate professor of dance at Wesleyan University, he is the author of Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam (Wesleyan University Press) and is currently co-editing a forthcoming volume entitled Dance and the Early South Indian Cinema (Oxford University Press).

Enjoy a slide show from Pablo Delano’s “Hartford Seen”

by gsanford • June 11, 2020

“With the images in Hartford Seen Pablo Delano captures the delicate balance between architectural permanence and the evanescence of community—a celebration of generations of residents and the structures they’ve shaped.”
—Frank Mitchell, Executive Director, The Amistad Center for Art & Culture

With more than 150 full-color images, Hartford Seen vitally expands the repertoire of photographic studies of American cities and of their contemporary built environments.

Hartford Unseen is a personal meditation on the city’s built environment. Documentary photographer Pablo Delano implements a methodical but intuitive approach, scrutinizing the layers of history embedded in the city’s fabric. He documents commercial establishments, industrial sites, places of worship, and homes with a painter’s eye to color and composition. His vision tends to eschew the city’s better-known landmarks in favor of vernacular structures that reflect the tastes and needs of the city’s diverse population at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Over the last 100 years Hartford may have transformed from one of America’s wealthiest cities to one of its poorest, but as suggested by Hartford Seen, today it nevertheless enjoys extraordinary cultural offerings, small entrepreneurship, and a vibrant spiritual life. The city’s historical palette consists mostly of the brownstone, redbrick, and gray granite shades common in New England’s older cities. Yet Delano perceives that it is also saturated with the blazing hues favored by many of its newer citizens.

In his essay, “Hartford Unseen,” Guillermo B. Irizarry explains how Delano was born in Puerto Rico to Eastern European Jewish artist emigrants. Moving to Hartford from the Bronx, Delano, as explained by Irizarry, “has for the past two decades scrutinized layers of history embedded in the Connecticut capital’s built environment.” The first major exhibition of this work was held at the Connecticut Historical Society in 2014. In the original exhibit catalog, artist Richard Hollant noted how “[p]eople walking down [the] street see things differently because cities like ours are built on hierarchies, and the people within them…adapt this model to make sense of their city in their own way…based on economic conditions, some by historical or social context, others by location.” Delano presents his metropolis “in a state of flux,” as he explains, where architecture, small businesses, and residential neighborhoods experience a visual layering as a result of change.

An introduction by Laura Wexler and the aforementioned essay by Guillermo B. Irizarry frame the historical context of the images, from the land theft and forced removal of Natives in the 17^th century through the city’s role in the slave trade and succession of immigrant communities that have called Hartford home over the decades. Traces of these stories are evident in Delano’s photographs, seen in the changing architecture, housing, public art, and colorful signage that grace Hartford’s neighborhoods and commercial districts.

PABLO DELANO holds BFA in painting from Temple University Tyler School of Arts and an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Fine Arts and the Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, where he has lived and taught for almost twenty-five years.