The Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, or RCAH, Center for Poetry will begin its 2018 Fall Writing Series Oct. 24. This year the series will include local and nationally renowned writers and musicians Russel Brakefield, Karin Gottshall and Sam Gleaves.
“The RCAH Center for Poetry offers students, staff, faculty, community members and people who come from some distance the opportunity to strengthen our relationship with language," said Cindy Hunter Morgan, interim director of the Center for Poetry. “We all want a world that has meaning in it. We all have some experience with grief. We all want some deeper experience about what it means to be human. Poetry draws us into a different kind of attention and awareness. It reminds us what it is to be human. In poems we hear our lives.”
This year’s theme celebrates “Every Tongue Unfurled,” a line from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess, who is one of the poets coming to campus this year, and addresses disconnection and fragmentation, struggle and resistance.
“Poets address history directly and personally, and part of their art is in their ability to manage emotional complexity and avoid simplification,” Hunter Morgan continued. “This is the kind of art and the kind of thinking we need at Michigan State to build a healthy climate and culture. Over the course of this academic year, we’re sharing opportunities for people to deepen their appreciation for the way poetry allows us to say what sometimes feels unsayable.”
Upcoming events include:
- 7 p.m. Oct. 24 at the RCAH Theater in Snyder Hall, Russell Brakefield.
- 7 p.m. Nov. 7 at the RCAH Theater in Snyder Hall, Karin Gottshall.
- 7 p.m. Nov. 14 at the RCAH Theater in Snyder Hall, Sam Gleaves.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information about the 2018 Fall Writing Series, visit http://poetry.rcah.msu.edu/fall-writing-series.html.