The 2023–24 Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College

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This year, Hartwick College and the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing will present four readings in the 2023–24 Visiting Writers Series. Readings take place at 7:00 in the Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.

Novelist and essayist Shena McAuliffe will read on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 from her new book of short stories, We Are a Teeming Wilderness: Stories (Press 53, 2023).

Poet and emeritus Hartwick professor Robert Bensen will read from his new book, What Lightning Spoke: New and Selected Poems (Bright Hill, 2023), on Wednesday, November 8, 20223.

Yumei Kitasei will read from her new novel, The Deep Sky (Flatiron Books, 2023), on Monday, March 4, 2024.

And poet essayist Joshua Zelesnick will read from his forthcoming poetry collection, Insert Coin (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025), on Thursday, April 11, 2024.

For more information, visit the Visiting Writers Series webpage.

Summer and Fall 2023 Links

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Manfred Laber, Zeitpyramide (1932-3183), concrete, 9.2 x 15 meters, Wemding, Germany.

The links have really gotten away from me. This summer, I was prioritizing finishing up a chapter for Too Big to Read, and this fall the semester just hammered me; I basically haven’t had a single free moment. So, better late than never, huh? Over six months of links. Enjoy.


Nuclear and Environmental

Apocalyptica, a new journal.

Jeff VanderMeer, “Florida’s Environmental Failures Are a Warning for the Rest of the US.”

Lydia Millet, “Biden’s Green Energy Money Is Sugar on a Poison Pill.”

Tina Cordova, “What Oppenheimer Doesn’t Tell You about the Trinity Test.”

Brad Plumer and Elena Shao, “Heat Records Are Broken Around the Globe as Earth Warms, Fast.”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Heat Is Not a Metaphor.”

David Gelles, “Climate Disasters Daily? Welcome to the ‘New Normal.’”

Tom Engelhardt, “Humanity Has Created Too Many Ways of Destroying Itself.”

Kim Tingley, “‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Everywhere. What Are They Doing to Us?”

Azby Brown, “Just Like That, Tons of Radioactive Waste Is Heading for the Ocean.”

Raymond Zhong, “Something Was Messing With Earth’s Axis. The Answer Has to Do With Us.”

Damian Carrington, “Canadian Lake Chosen to Represent Start of Anthropocene.”

Ralph Vartabedian, “A Poisonous Cold War Legacy That Defies a Solution.”

The Washington Post, “Where Dangerous Heat Is Surging.”

Michael Levenson, “Heat Wave and Blackout Would Send Half of Phoenix to ER, Study Says.”

Jessica Hurley, “The Irradiated Body as Postcolonial Lost Edge.”

Hoyt Long and Aarthi Vadde, “We Want Our Catastrophe TV.”

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MLA 2024: Twenty-First-Century Forms

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For this year’s Modern Language Association Convention, to be held January 4–7, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I organized and will be moderating a roundtable on Twenty-First-Century Forms, featuring the following speakers: Andrew Ferguson, Aislinn McDougall, Élika Ortega, Kimberly Southwick-Thompson, Kaushik Tekur, Anna Torres Cacoullos, and Zach Wagner. I have included the information about the panel and, below that, full abstracts from each speaker.

119. Twenty-First-Century Forms

Thursday, January 4, 2024, 5:15–6:30 p.m. (EST)

If one might argue that the novel and lyric poem have become residual forms, what literary forms are emerging in contemporaneity? Panelists explore emergent literary forms of the twenty-first century and their relationship with, instantiation in, or remediation by other (digital) media: Internet writing, social media, print-digital books, film, television, and other hybrid and multimodal narrative and poetic forms.

Speakers
Andrew Ferguson (U of Virginia)
Aislinn McDougall (U of Regina)
Élika Ortega (U of Colorado, Boulder)
Kimberly Southwick-Thompson (Jacksonville State U)
Kaushik Tekur (Binghamton U, State U of New York)
Anna Torres Cacoullos (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Zach Wagner (Binghamton U, State U of New York)

Presiding
Bradley J. Fest (Hartwick C)

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Hartwick College’s Faculty Lecture Series, Fall 2023

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This fall, the Faculty Development Committee and the Office of Academic Affairs at Hartwick College will present three speakers in the annual Faculty Lecture Series.

All talks take place at during the common hour: 12:20–1:20 p.m. in Eaton Lounge, Bresee Hall at Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York.

Admission to the readings is free and the events are open to the public.

Tessa Yang, “Two Truths and a Lie: Research in Fiction,” Friday, September 8, 2023.

Mark Kuhlmann, “The Uncommon Octopus: The Ecology of Octopus insularis at San Salvador Island, The Bahamas,” Friday, October 13, 2023.

Michael Branch, “Tuning In: Policing Rural Upstate New York through Police Radio Scanners,” Friday, November 10, 2023.

For more information, visit the Faculty Lecture Series webpage.

“Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis” in boundary 2

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boundary 2, vol 50, no 2, cover image I am honored to say that my interview with the great poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis,” has just been published in the most recent issue of boundary 2. (This link should provide access for three months.) I am deeply grateful to DuPlessis for corresponding with me during the summer of 2020. In lockdown with no childcare, corresponding with DuPlessis via email to conduct this interview (when I had a spare moment or two to do so) played a large part in keeping me sane during that difficult time. A huge thanks also to Racheal and Aviva, who were right there every day along with me while this interview was being conducted.

Here’s an abstract of the interview:

This interview with poet, essayist, literary critic, and collagist Rachel Blau DuPlessis was conducted via email correspondence between June 11 and August 29, 2020. Author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and half a dozen books in modernist studies, poetics, and feminist criticism, DuPlessis reflects broadly on her career in this interview. She discusses the ongoing role of feminism in her writing and thought, the forms of the fold and the fragment, the relationship between her poetry and criticism, her work in and on the long poem, and her post‐Drafts poetry, including her (at the time) most recent book, Late Work (2020). The interview concludes with a conversation about the relationship between poetry and theorizing practices and a meditation on writing during a global pandemic.

For my writing on DuPlessis: “‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”

And for previous interviews: “Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller” and “An Interview with Jonathan Arac.”

Spring 2023 Links

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Nuclear and Environmental

Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (1960).

Raymond Zhnog, “For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age.”

Nicholas Kristof, “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think.”

Rebecca Solnit, “What If Climate Change Meant Not Doom–But Abundance?”

Elizabeth Kolbert, “It’s Earth Day—and the News Isn’t Good.”

David Wallace-Wells, “Greta Thunberg: ‘The World Is Getting More Grim by the Day.'”

Mark O’Connell, “Our Way of Life Is Poisoning Us.”

Simon Schama, “Simon Schama on the Broken Relationship between Humans and Nature: ‘The Joke’s on Us. Things Are Amiss.'”

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2013–2017: Sonnets Will Be Published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024

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Fest, Bradley J--Cover for 2013-2017--600 resolution--coverI am absolutely thrilled to announce that 2013–2017: Sonnets, the first volume of my ongoing sonnet sequence, will be published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024. I’ll update this page with more information when I have it, but for now, here’s a description of the book:

2013–2017: Sonnets is the first volume in Bradley J. Fest’s ongoing sequence of American sonnets, a project concerned with how the distributed networks of the twenty-first century construct and filter time. Continuing the program of poetic assemblage explored in his first two books, these poems were composed consecutively as emergent temporal snapshots documenting certain experiences of what it was like to live precariously in the overdeveloped world between 2013 and 2017. Over the past decade, this ongoing experimental sonnet sequence has become: a complex encounter with time and its twenty-first-century rhythms; a document of artistic maturation; a personal archive of occasions, moments, days; a continually refreshed confrontation with the global computational hyperarchive; a discography of popular music; an extended reflection on contemporary literature, art, and culture; an increasingly multiplex meditation on the sonnet; an historical record of the troubling national situation in the United States; and a work of mourning for a world disappearing into climate emergency. The second volume, currently in progress, begins in 2018.

Also, thanks much to my very good friend Taylor Baldwin for the amazing cover image: The Interpreter (2010).