New Book Event Featuring LeAnne Howe and Magdalena Zurawski

The Creative Writing Program is proud to present a reading and book talk with professors LeAnne Howe and Magdalena Zurawski on Tuesday, April 9th, 7 p.m. at Cine (234 W Hancock Ave, Athens, GA 30601).  Both professors will read from their latest works and the reading will be followed by a panel discussion curated by professor Andrew Zawacki.  This event is free and open to the public.

Professor Howe’s latest work is Savage Conversations, published by Coffee House Press.  From Publishers Weekly: “Written in the form of a poetically infused play, Howe’s illuminating and challenging work draws its dramatic energy from the hanging of 38 members of the Dakota tribe in Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 26, 1862—the largest mass execution in American history—under the order of Abraham Lincoln. The narrative is set primarily in the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Batavia, Ill., in 1875 and features three characters: Mary Todd Lincoln, whom her son Robert had institutionalized there earlier that year; Savage Indian, a personification of the executed Dakotas and their tribe; and The Rope, an image of the U.S.’s tools of execution. Basing their interactions on Mary’s reported delusions of an Indian spirit who mauls her nightly, Howe choreographs an intimate pas de deux between Mary, who excoriates her husband and family for their neglect, and the Savage Indian, a symbol of national guilt and injustice.”

Dr. Zurawski’s latest work is The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom, forthcoming from Wave Books.  From Wave Books: “Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski’s poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.”