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Celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride

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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

Cover of Magnified by Minnie Bruce Pratt

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.

 

cover of Occasional Views Vol 1 by Samuel Delany

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.

 

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

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

“Public Figures” Revisited

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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.”

 

 

Celebrating Aboriginal Veterans Day

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Today is Canadian Aboriginal Veterans Day. As is true of the First Nations people of Canada, Native Americans enlist in the United States military at a higher rate than their white counterparts. At least 12,000 Native Americans enlisted to fight in WWI, at at time when they did not qualify for United States citizenship.

Novelist Gerald Vizenor’s trilogy of novels from Wesleyan University Press follow the story of the Beaulieu brothers, Basile and Aloysius. In Blue Ravens they come of age and leave the White Earth Reservation to fight on European battlefields during WWI. Native Tributes follows the brothers as they participate in the Bonus Army March on Washington DC. In his forthcoming novel, Satie on the Seine, Vizenor brings the brothers back to Europe. They seek lives as artists in Paris—only to witness the Nazi occupation of the city.

 

Blue Ravens

Native Tributes

Surprise by Rick Bartow (Wiyot, 1946–2016). Cover art for Satie on the Seine.

Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade
A Historical Novel by Gerald Vizenor
Publication Date:  September 8, 2020
Trade Paper, $17.95 / 978-0-8195-7934-8; Ebook, $14.99 / 978-0-8195-7935-5

Basile Hudon Beaulieu wrote fifty letters to the heirs of the fur trade between October 1932 and January 1945. The messages were circulated on the White Earth Reservation. At the end of the war the letters were translated as native chronicles in a six volume roman fleuve, narrative sequence, published by Nathan Crémieux at the Galerie Ghost Dance in Paris, France.

The letters convey the mercy of liberté, the torment and solidarity of Le Front Populaire, the Popular Front, an alliance of political leftists, and the contest of ethos and governance in the French Third Republic. Basile relates the massacres of Native Americans, and the misery of federal policies on reservations to the savage strategies of royalists, fascists, communists, and antisemites during the eight years before war was declared against Germany, and to the end of the Nazi Occupation of Paris.

The letters to the heirs of the fur trade during the war reveal the cruelty and deprivations of the Nazi Occupation, the fearsome Prefécture de Police, persecution of Jews, and the eternal shame of the Vélodrome d’Hiver Roundup. Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the Vichy Regime, and betrayal of résistance networks are condemned, and at the same time the littérature engagée of Romain Rolland and liberation of the French Third Republic are celebrated in the last emotive letters.

About the author
Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa) is a novelist, essayist, and interdisciplinary scholar of Native American culture and literature. He is professor emeritus of American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity (Nebraska, 2019), and three recent novels, Chair of Tears (Nebraska), Blue Ravens (Wesleyan), and Native Tributes (Wesleyan).

 

Celebrating the Bauhaus’ Centennial

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The Bauhaus, 1919–1933

In the wake of the First World War, conceptions of art, mechanization, and technology were becoming much-discussed subjects by aestheticians. German architect Walter Gropius attempted to synthesize these subjects in 1919 when he opened the Bauhaus, a studio in Weimar, Germany that would eventually become eponymous for the ideals of the school. Now, a hundred years after the Bauhaus was founded, people are returning their gaze to the avant-garde artistic school. Lars Müller Publishers has collaborated with Bauhaus-Archiv and Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin to publish a facsimile edition of bauhaus journal, a publication that ran from 1926-1931. The recirculation of bauhaus journal addresses the methods and focal points of Bauhaus teachings, and it touches on how the Bauhaus became the movement that it was in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Proclamation of the Bauhaus, made in 1919, stated that the Bauhaus was a utopian craft guild that would combine architecture, culture, and painting into one creative expression. By focusing on creative expression, artists aimed to reimagine the material world as a reflection of the abstract arts. By 1923, the Bauhaus changed their philosophy on design—instead of focusing solely on the material as a reflection of the abstract, artists began to make “Art for Industry,” concentrating on how technology can change the way that material is created. Crafts like cabinet-making, weaving, metal-working, and typography became focal points for Bauhaus innovation throughout the 1920s.

Textile sample, ca. 1945. Cellophane and jute, 91 x 101.5 cms.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Anni Albers, 1970. c. 1998 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Selected Writings on Design by Anni Albers (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)

For Anni Albers, a former student at the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus style taught artists to be “unburdened by any considerations of practical application.” As Albers describes in Selected Writings on Design (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), “this uninhibited play with materials resulted in amazing objects, striking in their newness of conception in regard to use of color and compositional elements—objects of often quite barbaric beauty.”

Design for wallhanging, 1926. Gouache on paper, 31.8 x 20.6 cms. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer. Photograph c. 2000 The Museum of Modern Art. In Selected Writings on Design by Anni Albers (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)

The Bauhaus continued until 1933, when many important figures of the movement and school emigrated to the United States before the outset of World War II, including Albers herself. Bauhaus figures would go on to influence important movements in arts and architecture following the Second World War.

Design for tablecloth, Bauhaus, Germany, 1930. Watercolor and gouache on square-ruled paper, 26 x 24.1 cms. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer. Photograph c. 2000 The Museum of Modern Art. In Selected Writings on Design by Anni Albers (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)

The Theater of the Bauhaus

Bauhaus theater was also a form that attempted a synthesis of art and modern technology, trying to achieve “the aim of finding a new and powerful working correlation of artistic creation to culminate finally in a new cultural equilibrium of the visual environment.” (The Theater of the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Farkas Molnár, Wesleyan University Press, 1961) What that meant was experimenting with all visual aspects of theater, from the way an actor moved to how actors interacted with the stage. Theater was considered to be an artistic material shaped by the artist in order to convey a specific message or emotion, and conceptions of theatrical material was divided into form and color. This form and color took motion on stage, and the actor became the bearer of material to the audience instead of being independent of the stage. Thus, Bauhaus directors experimented with “de-humanizing” the actor, as seen in the piece “The Circus,” where the actors face and body were covered completely by costumes and masks.

Alexander Schawinsky, “Scene from the Circus. First performance 1924 at the Bauhaus.” From The Theater of the Bauhaus by Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and Molnár (Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

These conceptions of “theatrical forms” would also become influential in avant-garde theater in the later parts of the century, and it marked a departure from more traditional theater that focused on the actor as a human form instead of the messenger of form and color. Now, a century since the inception of the Bauhaus, one can still see Bauhaus influence on modern day theater, from imposing, architectural set design to more abstract pieces that focus on substance in form.

For additional reading on innovative theater, check out Wesleyan University Press’ Open Book collection online.

Sources:

The Bauhaus, 1919-1933, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Online

Selected Writings on Design, by Anni Albers

The Theater of the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnár

bauhaus journal 1926-1931, facsimile edition, ed. Lars Müller

The Age of Phillis, forthcoming from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

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Wesleyan University Press is pleased to announce we have secured the world rights to The Age of Phillis, a new volume of poetry by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who is represented by Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company.

The Age of Phillis is the result of over a decade of research and contemplation by Jeffers. She draws on historical sources to take readers into the world of Phillis Wheatley, the first black American woman to publish a book. Wheatley published a volume of poetry entitled Poems of Various Subjects, Religion, and Morals on September 1, 1773. Jeffers imagines Wheatley’s thoughts as she navigates life as an intellectual, as an enslaved person, as an observant poet, and as a woman of African descent—eventually a freed woman, and wife, whose life would be cut short by poverty and illness.

Wesleyan plans for for a Spring 2020 publication date.

About the Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of four previous books of poetry including The Glory Gets, published by Wesleyan University Press in May 2015. Her other books are: The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State, 2000)—selected by Lucille Clifton for the Wick Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan, 2003), and Red Clay Suite (Southern Illinois, 2007).

Her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, African American Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Obsidian III, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and has been anthologized in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2011) and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Georgia, 2009). Her critical writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. Jeffers has received numerous awards and honors, including a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, a lifetime achievement honor, and an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for Women Writers. For her research on Phillis Wheatley, Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization for the study of early American history and culture, to which fourteen US presidents have elected. She is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

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Announcing “Sol LeWitt”

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An intimate portrait of a renowned conceptual artist

“One of the interesting things about living through a period is you know where the recorded history and the happenstance of the moment diverge. Consequently, having known Sol LeWitt since my days as an art student in New York in the 1960s, I appreciate the clear and concise manner that Lary Bloom has scrupulously chronicled not only Sol’s artistic development, but also his personal life and his ever-changing social milieu. The results are an insightful and intimate portrait of the artist, the man and his times.”
— Saul Ostrow, Founder of Critical Practices, Inc.

 

Sol LeWitt (1928−2007), one of the most influential and important artists of the twentieth century, upended how art is made and marketed. As a key figure in minimalism and conceptualism, he proclaimed that for the artist the work of the mind is more important than that of the hand. (He argued, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”) But even as his wall drawings and sculpture were admired around the world (installed, over time, by thousands of young artists, and marketed not as objects but as concepts), and even as he championed the work of hundreds of colleagues including many women whose efforts were spurned by the bullies of a male-dominated profession, he remained an enigmatic figure, refusing to participate in the culture of celebrity. Lary Bloom’s biography Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas links the extraordinary arc of his life to his iconic work. The author draws on personal recollections of LeWitt, whom he knew during the last two decades of the artist’s life, as well as letters and papers and over one hundred original interviews, including those with Chuck Close, Ingrid Sischy, Adrian Piper, Philip Glass, and Carl Andre. The result is a full and absorbing portrait of a man who, following the flashy and self-aggrandizing period of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, stripped art down to its basics and, with a band of rebellious colleagues, started over again.

Lary Bloom has authored or co-authored ten books including The Writer Within, The Test of Our Times, with Tom Ridge, and Letters from Nuremberg, with Christopher Dodd. He has taught writing at Yale University, Fairfield University, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

May 7, 2019
356 pp. 28 illus., 6 x 9”
Jacketed Cloth, $35.00 978-0-8195-7868-6

NYC panel on the artwork and life of Sol LeWitt, May 5th

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Please join biographer and friend to the author, Sol LeWitt; artist, author, and curator Pablo Helguera; and Karen Gunderson artist and colleague of Lewitt, at McNally Jackson bookstore (Prince Street), March 6, at 6PM. Read more about the event here.

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An excerpt relating to Gunderson’s relationship with LeWitt.

During the 1970s, LeWitt split his time between New York and Spoleto. And when he went to Italy it was often with his female companion at the time. The first to follow Wheeler and Conrad-Eybesfeld was a young artist (again, much younger than LeWitt).

Karen Gunderson—like Gene Beery, a native of Racine, Wisconsin—had earned a master’s degree at the University of Iowa and was teaching at Ohio State University (OSU), in Columbus, when she met LeWitt. Her classes included intermedia (she was a pioneer scholar in this new field), art history, and sculpture. As she recalled in an interview in 2014, “It was me and forty men at OSU. I got patted on top of my head or on my ass every day.”

Read more from this excerpt from Sol LeWitt.

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Three Wesleyan University Press Authors Receive 2019 Guggenheim Fellowships

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Congratulations to three Wesleyan University Press authors who have been awarded the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. This year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation chose 168 recipients from 30,000 applicants from the United States and Canada. Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Winners from the Press include:

Ann Cooper Albright

Ann Cooper Albright is Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at Oberlin College. She is the author of Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), and Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). She is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Dance Studies.

Camille Dungy

Camille Dungy is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. She is the author of Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award in 2018. She is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.

Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He is the author of In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018. He is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.

 

 

 

Chapbooks by Kit and Joseph Reed now available as a set!

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Wesleyan University Press has recreated three enchanting, humorous chapbooks originally produced for friends by the late Kit and Joseph Reed. The books were written by Kit and lavishly illustrated by Joseph.

All three books are now available as a set. 

Thirty Polite Things to Say

          Amusing guide to social etiquette.

The preface reads: “There are times in the lives of us all in which we are at a loss for words. This volume attempts a partial solution.” What follows are thirty things perhaps we shouldn’t say, but often find ourselves uttering.
32 pp. 4 x 6″ Paper, $6.95, 978-0-8195-7859-4

Dog Truths

          A whimsically serious chapbook about dogs

The chapbook includes absurd graphs, charts, and diagrams that tell the “truth” about various dog breeds—size, attitude, and likability. Dog truths are laid bare here, setting the record straight. Woof.
12pp. 4 x 6″ Paper, $6.95, 978-0-8195-7860-0

Deaths of the Poets

          A darkly humorous homage to poets and their deaths

Rhyming couplets meet slightly-sardonic etchings in this whimsically dark chapbook chronicling the dramatic ends of some of our most beloved poets.
34 pp. 4 x 6″ Paper, $6.95, 978-0-8195-7858-7

Kit Reed (June 7, 1932–September 24, 2017) was an American author and journalist whose short stories were nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Tiptree Awards. Joseph Reed is Professor Emeritus of Film and American Studies at Wesleyan University.

Also by Kit Reed
The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories
Seven for the Apocalypse
Weird Women, Wired Women

Q & A with Mary Kathryn Nagle on Native Theater and YIPAP

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Mary Kathryn Nagle contributed a powerful original essay to introduce Wesleyan’s new theater volume, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses. Her essay is entitled “Joy Harjo’s Wings: A Revolution on the American Stage.” Nagle explains how negative and demeaning representations of Native people in popular culture are not without consequence to Native people. She writes:

“Redface was purposefully created to tell a false, demeaning story. Redface constitutes a false portrayal of Native people—most often performed by non–Natives wearing a stereotypical ‘native’ costume that bears no relation to actual Native people, our stories, our struggles, or our survival in a country that has attempted to eradicate us. The continued dominant perception that American Indians are the racial stereotypes they see performed on the American stage is devastating to our sovereign rights to define our own identity. Of course, that’s why it was invented.”

Join Joy Harjo & Priscilla Page at the Yale Center for British Art, March 5, 4PM.

Nagle is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She currently serves as executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP)—who are sponsoring Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page’s visit to Yale on Tuesday, March 5th. She is also a partner at Pipestem Law, PC, where she works to protect tribal sovereignty and the inherent right of Indian Nations to protect their women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault. Curious to learn more about YIPAP, I asked Mary Kathryn some questions about the program, and Native theater in general. Here are her answers:

Q. How long has YIPAP been existence? Can you tell me a little about how the department came to be?
A. YIPAP was formed in 2015, following the performance of SLIVER OF A FULL MOON at Yale Law School. Professor Ned Blackhawk noted that several of the Native students were moved and inspired when they witnessed professional Native actors, alongside Native women survivors, sharing Native stories in a play. Because Native people hardly ever see authentic Native people on stage, this one performance was very impactful. Professor Blackhawk wanted to sustain this work and give students exposure to professional Native performing artists, while also assisting with the development of Native artists more broadly in the field. This is the work YIPAP has been dedicated to.

Q. What do you envision for YIPAP, moving forward?
A. We hope to expand our programing and partnerships in order to bring more Native artists to college campuses and tribal communities to work directly with youth.

Q. What would you like to say about “Native Theater” as a concept? Misconceptions? Relevancy? How long it’s actually been around? How is it different than Non-Native theater?
A. I think the biggest misconception today about Native theater is that somehow our stories do not appeal or are not relevant to non-Natives. Powerful stories are powerful stories. Good stories are good stories. Just like the stories of ALL of the other communities that comprise the United States today, our stories are universal in their humanity and always relevant to the issues everyone faces today.

Nagle has authored numerous briefs in federal appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. She studied theater and social justice at Georgetown University as an undergraduate student, and received her JD from Tulane University Law School, where she graduated summa cum laude and received the John Minor Wisdom Award. She is a frequent speaker at law schools and symposia across the country. Her articles have been published in law review journals including the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Yale Law Journal (online forum), Tulsa Law Review, and Tulane Law Review, among others. Nagle is an alum of the 2012 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, where she developed her play Manahatta in Public Studio (May 2014). Productions include Miss Lead  (Amerinda, 59E59, January 2014) and Fairly Traceable  (Native Voices at the Autry, March 2017). Upcoming productions include Arena Stage’s world premiere of Sovereignty, Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s world premiere of Manahatta, and others.