DePaul’s Dr. Francesca Royster and Dr. Amor Kohli join Ayana Contreras from Vocalo Radio to discuss selections from Mavis Staples’ vibrant catalog along with other songs of resistance and protest.
January 17 at 6 PM
Room 115
Richardson Library
Tag: Richardson Library
Women’s Voices, Irish Writing: 300 Years Of Speaking Out
Dr. Angela Bourke, author of The Burning of Bridget Cleary and Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker, will examine the disruptive effects of Irish women’s voices from the 18th century to the present. Focusing on representative individuals across the period, Bourke will begin with oral lament poetry before turning to the modern era and figures such as Bridget Cleary, Molly Ivors in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Irish-born Maeve Brennan of The New Yorker, and contemporary Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.
Wednesday, November 8, 4:30-5:30 PM
Richardson Library, Room 300
Bourke has published creative and non-fiction work in both English and the Irish language. She teaches at UCD and has been a visiting professor at a number of American universities. Bourke was a co-editor of volumes 4 and 5 of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Visiting Writer: Allison Joseph
Please join the DePaul Department of English as we welcome poet and editor Allison Joseph to the Visiting Writers Program on
Thursday, October 5 @ 6 PM
Richardson Library 115
2350 N Kenmore Avenue
Joseph, director of the Southern Illinois University MFA Program in Creative Writing, is the author of What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon, 1997), In Every Seam (Pittsburgh, 1997), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003) and Worldly Pleasures (Word Press, 2004). Her honors include the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize, fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is editor and poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review and director of the Young Writers Workshop, an annual summer residential creative writing workshop for high school writers, and holds the Judge Williams Holmes Cook Endowed Professorship.
Event Spotlight: Visiting Writers Kathleen Rooney, Martin Seay
by Robert M. Keding
contributor to the Underground
Packed in to a small meeting room in DePaul’s Richardson Library, a large audience gathered to hear authors Kathleen Rooney and Martin Seay read selections from their newest novels, and then answer questions on their creative processes and experiences within the literary world.
Martin Seay’s book is entitled The Mirror Thief, and follows three different con artists working in sixteenth-century Venice, 1950s Venice Beach, California, and modern-day Las Vegas in the Venice Casino. This bold debut novel, weaving together these three seemingly separate but mysteriously linked narratives, is a masterfully written tale, evoking comparisons to such work as Cloud Atlas.
Seay’s advice to aspiring writers is to do a lot of background research, especially for period pieces like The Mirror Thief. “Even if you have the facts and details right, you still have to make sure the dialogue flows correctly too. Otherwise you might just end up with characters that sound like the people faking British accents on the subway,” he told the crowd. To get the sixteenth-century portions of the story sounding right, he found himself reading a lot of literature of that time—especially Shakespeare.
Kathleen Rooney spoke about her recent novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk. This is her second novel, and was just published by St. Martin’s Press in the first weeks of 2017. The story chronicles an aging Lillian, going for a stroll around New York City and recounting various moments during her life, from humble beginnings to a career as the highest-paid woman in American advertising.
Rooney’s advice touched on the differences between writing prose and poetry, another realm of literature which she is invested in. “It’s possible to accidentally sit down and write a great poem. It’s a task so durationally shorter and full of so many chances for happy mistakes… It is, however, much more difficult to sit down for an hour or two and come up saying, ‘Whoops, I just accidentally wrote a really well-crafted novel!’” The room, undoubtedly filled with aspiring writers, could certainly relate.
Be sure to look for The Mirror Thief and Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, in bookstores now.
Veterans Spat On, Called ‘Baby Killers’: The Mythical Imagery of America’s Lost War in Vietnam
DePaul’s English Department and Big Shoulders Books are co-sponsoring an event on
Monday, October 24, 6:00 p.m.
Veterans Spat On, Called ‘Baby Killers’:
The Mythical Imagery of America’s Lost War in Vietnam
a lecture by Professor Jerry Lembcke, College of the Holy Cross
Richardson Library 400 (Dorothy Day Room)
The Underground 