Poets Mark Bibbins and Mónica de la Torre will read from their work next Thursday, October 22 at 8 pm in Hurst Lounge, Duncker 201.

Mark Bibbins is the author of the forthcoming collection The Dance of No Hard Feelings and Sky Lounge, for which he received a Lambda Literary Award.  His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, Boston Review and elsewhere.

Mónica de la Torre is the author of the poetry books Talk Shows, Acúfenos (a collection in Spanish), and, most recently Public Domain. She translated the books Poems by Gerardo Deniz and Mauve Sea-Orchids by Lila Zemborai.  She is senior editor at BOMB Magazine.

The reading will be followed by a reception and book sale.

The title of Eleanor Kaufman's talk is "Plants Against Life".

Eleanor Kaufman is associate professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies at UCLA.  She is the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (Columbia University Press, forthcoming); and editor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, (Minnesota, 1998).  She has published essays in journals such as Diacritics, Parallax< SAQ, Postmodern Culture, The Oxford Literary Review, Criticism, and Angelaki.

Simon Gikandi Talk on November 4th at 5:00 pm.  The title is "Transforming Empire: Postcolonial Writers and the Ruins of Englishness". 

Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University.  He specializes in Anglophone African and Caribbean literature, as well as the culture of the postwar Black Atlantic and African Diaspora.  He has written a number of books, including Maps of Englishness:  Writing Identity in Colonial Culture (Columbia 1996), Writing in Limbo:  Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Cornell 1992), and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Cambridge 2009).  He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African LiteratureThe Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature.