UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
ROB SMITH is a novelist and a professor at Knox College in the Department of English. His stories have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Manchester Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Barcelona Review, StoryQuarterly, J Journal and many other literary magazines, and he was recipient of the Scotsman Orange Short Story Award. His critical monograph The Seductions of Emily Dickinson won the Elizabeth Agee Prize, and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. His story collection The Violence was published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2015.
Rob Smith
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main
January 19, 2024
CHRISTINA SHAVER is an award-winning indie filmmaker based in Chicago, Illinois. The Aledo Movie is her second produced feature film. Her first feature, called Cecily and Lydia at the Waypoint, won best picture, best director, best screenplay, and best actress for the Midwest Film Festival’s awards in 2021. She graduated from Northwestern University with a BA in Music (1997), and from the Harold Ramis Film School (2017).
JULIA HUNTER is a Chicago-based documentary director and cinematographer who has worked on shows for Apple TV+, AMC, VH1, Discovery+, countless independent projects and is currently on staff at Kindling Group. She is a graduate of Knox College.
Christina Shaver and Julia Hunter
Caxton Club
Round Room, CFA
January 29, 2024
MILK ROUTE (formerly known as Writers’ Forum) is the English Department’s student reading series held on occasional late afternoons throughout the year. An homage to Carl Sandburg, who at the age of thirteen left school to get a job driving a milk wagon so that he could assist in supporting his family, Milk Route honors the transitional period in which our senior writing majors may find themselves. While finishing their studies at Knox, they also are beginning their lives as adults, discovering new experiences in jobs, graduate programs and cities of residence. All the while, too, they are still making room to make their art.
Students and faculty gather for these formal readings, which offer senior writing majors an opportunity to share from their own work. In conjunction with an upper-level creative writing workshop, participation in Milk Route fulfills the College’s Oral Competency requirement for writing majors.
SENIOR SEMINAR gives Literature Majors the opportunity to synthesize the skills and information acquired as an English major. The course will have a different theme each year. Recent themes include “Adaptation,” “Irony,” “Noir,” “Homeless in the Waste Land,” “On the Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” “The Literary Vampire,” “Animal Gothic,” “Visions and Revisions: Three Victorian Novels and Their (Post)modern Reworkings,” “Pulp,” “The Uncanny,” “Trauma and Visuality,” "Bodies on Display," “Hauntology,” "Whiteness in Literature," and “Bodies.” This year our theme is “Play.”
During the first part of the term, students will read and interpret texts much as they would for any upper-level English class. The second part of the term focuses on the Symposium—an opportunity for them to present their ideas to the entire department. The exact format of the Symposium varies from year to year. Students in the course not only present their work, but organize, publicize, and run Symposium. At the end of the term, students compose an article-length piece of literary criticism—an extension and revision of their Symposium presentation—which responds to current scholarship and presents an original argument. This year’s theme is ‘Abolition Rhetoric.’
CARL PHILLIPS is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. A new book of poems, Scattered Snows, to the North, will be out in the early fall of 2024. Phillips’s honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Library of Congress. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). He teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Carl Phillips
Caxton Club
Red Room, Seymour Library Friday, April 12, 2024 4:00PM - 5:00PM
RAKESH SATYAL (pronoun inclusive) is the author of the novels Blue Boy and No One Can Pronounce My Name. Blue Boy won a Lambda Literary Award, won the Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. It is currently being developed as a film by the writer, director, actor, and comedian Nik Dodani. No One Can Pronounce My Name was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. Satyal has worked as an editor in book publishing for two decades. He lives with his husband in Brooklyn.
Rakesh Satyal
Caxton Club
Keiner Letterpress Studio, CFA Monday, April 22, 2024 4:00PM - 5:00PM
EDUARDO C. CORRAL is the son of Mexican immigrants. Graywolf Press published his second book, Guillotine, in 2020. His first book, Slow Lightning, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His poems have appeared in Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He's the recipient of residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and Civitella Ranieri. He's also the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship and the National Holmes Poetry Prize, both from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. He lives in Raleigh.
Eduardo C. Corral
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main Friday, May 03, 2024 4:00PM - 5:00PM
OSO GUARDIOLA, Macondista, received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Maytag Scholarship and the Arthur James Pflughaupt Prize in Fiction. His short stories have been awarded the 2023 Gulf Coast Prize for Fiction, the 2022 runner-up for the J.F. Powers Prize in Fiction, and the 2021 Honorable Mention for the San Miguel Writers' Contest in Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Latino Book Review Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, and Dappled Things Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Gulf Coast Magazine. Today, Oso pursues an M.F.A. in Creative Writing - Spanish at the University of Iowa Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Oso Guardiola
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main Friday, May 17, 2024 4:00PM - 5:00PM
TOM FUCOLORO ‘08 is the founder of Seattle Bike Blog (seattlebikeblog.com) and has served as its editor since 2010. He is a leading voice on bike issues in the region. He blends his longtime reporting with new interviews and archival research to tell the story of how a flourishing bike culture emerged despite the obstacles of climate, topography, and—most importantly—an entrenched, car-centric urban landscape and culture. From the arrival of the first bicycles in the late nineteenth century to the bike-share entrepreneurs of the present day, the result is a unique perspective on Seattle's history and its future. He was named one of "15 People Who Should Really Run Seattle" by Seattle Met magazine.
Tom Fucoloro
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main Friday, May 17, 2024 4:00PM - 5:00PM
ANNA KORNBLUH’s, research and teaching interests center on the novel, film, and cultural aesthetics in theoretical perspective, including formalist, marxist, and psychoanalytic approaches. She is the author of Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury "Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014). Essays on climate aesthetics, tv, academic labor, and psychoanalysis have appeared in venues like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics, Differences, and Portable Gray. She is a member of the UIC United Faculty bargaining team and the editorial boards of Novel, Mediations, Genre, and Parapraxis, as well as the founding facilitator of InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory), and a partner in Humanitiesworks.org.
Anna Kornbluh
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main Tuesday, May 21, 2024 4:00PM - 5:00PM
NEAL BELL is a recipient of grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and the NEA, and received an OBIE Award for sustained excellence in playwriting. His plays - including Two Small Bodies, Somewhere in The Pacific, On The Bum, and Cold Sweat - have appeared at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and in regional theaters including South Coast Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Mark Taper Forum. Mr. Bell’s theater adaptations of classic novels include Monster (a version of Frankenstein), Therese Raquin (after the Zola novel, and filmed as In Secret (2013), and McTeague (based on the Frank Norris novel and commissioned by Berkeley Rep). His play Spatter Pattern won an Edgar Award for best mystery play (2005), and his most recent book, published by Routledge in 2020, is How to Write A Horror Movie. Mr. Bell has taught at Yale, Princeton, NYU, the New School and Boston University, and currently teaches play and screen writing at Duke University, where he’s been a member of the Theater Studies Department since 2006.