- Programs at NCCROW
- 2009/2010 Theme: Storytelling
- Posted October 3, 2008
The Newcomb College Center for Research on Women has enjoyed a long history of stellar programming. Traditionally, three major programs have acted as keystones for the Center’s programming: the Florie Gale Arons Poet, the Zale-Writer-in-Residence, and the Adele Ramos Salzer Lecture.
While in the past committees have selected speakers with a wide net in regards to topic and scope, this past year the Center began to shift its direction to focus each year on a specific theme. The theme chosen reflects an area of research in which NCCROW is particularly strong. This year's programming theme is "Storytelling." C.D. Wright is 11th Florie Gale Arons poet and Amy Hempel is the 25th Zale Writer-in-Residence and both are respected as authors and storytellers.
C.D. Wright, one of
America’s most compelling and idiosyncratic poets, was born and raised in the
Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Her collaboration with photographer Deborah
Luster, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana was awarded the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize.
Wright is a recipient of a Macarthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the
Robert Creeley Award, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. She is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor at Brown University and lives
outside of Providence with her husband, poet Forrest Gander.
Amy Hempel was born in Chicago in 1951. She lived in Denver
and San Francisco before moving to New York to work in publishing. With the
publication of her first book of short stories, Reasons to Live (Knopf, 1985), Amy Hempel earned a reputation in the
vanguard of American short story writers. One of the stories from that
collection, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” is one of the most
extensively anthologized stories of the last quarter century. Her stories have
appeared in Harper’s,
GQ, Vanity Fair, and many other publications and have been
anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize among others. She has taught writing at Bennington,
Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, Duke, Columbia, and now teaches writing at Harvard.
She lives in New York City.
In the Spring of 2008 the Center’s programs highlighted the area of sexuality studies with Michelle Tea as the Zale-Writer-in-Residence and Susie Bright as the Salzer lecturer. During the 2008/2009 academic year the theme for programming is “Disaster and Recovery.” The 2008 Arons Poet was Nicole Cooley, whose most recent work, Breach, is a collection of Katrina-themed poetry. Claire Messud was the 24th-Zale-Writer in Residence in the Spring of 2009, and her best-selling novel, The Emperor’s Children, is set in New York City in 2001. Her novel deals with the themes of both personal disaster and recovery as well as September 11th. Monica Edelstein and Martha Ward, Dedra Johnson, and Cheryl Wagner are
local authors who read from disaster and recovery themed works set
in New Orleans as part of the Adele Ramos Reading Series.
In addition to the three major programs, NCCROW will also host a series of talks the Center’s Visiting Scholars. The Center is making an effort to move toward research-based and scholarly programming. To further this end, NCCROW is currently engaged in a researching mapping project which will serve as a guide to those interested in gender based research being conducted at Tulane University. The Center also offered summer programs in Italy and Rwanda in June of 2009.
