UPCOMING EVENTS 2023-2024
UPCOMING EVENTS 2023-2024
JoAnna Novak's memoir Contradiction Days was published by Catapult in July 2023. Her fourth book of poetry, DOMESTIREXIA, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2024. Novak’s short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and three books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her essay “My $1000 Anxiety Attack” was anthologized in About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of The New York Times. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher, Tammy.
JoAnna Novak
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday, September 22nd, 4-5 p.m.
Milk Route 2025
Fridays: February 2nd, February 16th, March 1st
Location: Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library
Starting at: 4:30 PM
Professor Rob Smith
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday January 19th, 4-5 p.m.
Tuesday 25 & Wednesday 26, February
Alumni Room, Old Main 100
Starting at: 4:30 PM
MILK ROUTE is the Creative Writing major’s capstone reading series. 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 the capstone portfolio course, participation in Milk Route fulfills the College’s Oral Competency requirement for writing majors.
John and Elaine Fellowes Professor of English Rob Smith will read from his novel The Scotsman, winner of the 2020 Black Spring Crime Writing Prize. His book, The Seductions Of Emily Dickinson, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1996 and received the Elizabeth Agee Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award. In 2003, he co-edited with Ellen Weinauer the collection American Culture, Canons and The Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. His essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Contemporary Literature, Narrative, Journal of Narrative Technique, Arizona Quarterly, American Transcendental Quarterly and ESQ. Smith has also published short fiction in numerous U.S. and European literary magazines, including Manchester Review, Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, Fugue, Barrelhouse, StoryQuarterly, The Warwick Review, Barcelona Review, Versal and Chapman, among many others. He received the Scotsman Orange Short Story Award in 2004. His story collection The Violence was published in fall 2015 with Queen’s Ferry Press.
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Rakesh addresses the themes of immigrant experience, alienation, friendship, perseverance, and queerness among Indian American communities living in the Midwest. Rakesh will be reading from his second novel, No One Can Pronounce My Name (2017). You can find the first two chapters of the novel and posters for this event and the Caxton series attached to this email. (A copy of the complete novel is on reserve in the Seymour Library.) You can also visit this shared folder to read "When Barbie Came to Live With Us," Rakesh's essay about the "My Size" Barbie that makes a fabulous cameo in the book. And be sure to watch Rakesh talk about his novel on Late Night with Seth Meyers!.
Ryan Tracy
Caxton Club
Keiner Letterpress Studio, CFA
Thursday 22 May, 4-5 p.m.
Ryan Tracy is the author of Lines in the Shed (forthcoming) and Tender Bottoms (2022). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Pank (2019 Pushcart Prize nomination for fiction), Sugar House Review, Feral, Twin Bird Review, The Hyacinth Review, Chronogram, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and Calliope. He makes pottery, performs, and writes music, among other creative endeavors. His scholarly research has appeared in venues such as PMLA, Feminist Modernist Studies, Derrida Today, and Arizona Quarterly. Ryan is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
Senior Symposium
SENIOR SYMPOSIUM 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 “The Rhetoric of Abolition.”
Carl Phillips
Caxton Club
Red Room, Seymour Library
Friday, 12th April, 4-5 p.m.
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.
Eduardo Corral
Caxton Club & Davenport Poetry Judge
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday, May 3rd, 4-5 p.m.
Rakesh Satyal
Caxton Club
Keiner Letterpress Studio
Monday April 22nd, 4-5 p.m.
Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He’s the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning, which won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He'll begin teaching in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis in the fall of 2024.
