Media Contact: Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383; mleventhal@colum.edu
Chicago, September 2003-- Allison Joseph will read from her most recent book, Imitation of Life (Carnegie-Mellon University, 2003), at Columbia College on Thursday, October 23, at 5:30 p.m. in the Concert Hall, 1014 S. Michigan Avenue. The program is free and open to the public. Please call 312-344-8100 for information.
Joseph was born in London to parents of Jamaican heritage, and grew up in Toronto and the Bronx. Her father opposed her study of creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio because there were only two other black students in that program. She earned her M.F.A. from Indiana University. Her many awards include a fellowship and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council, fellowships from Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and an Associated Writing Programs Prize. Her first book, What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), won the Ampersand Women Poets Series Prize and the John C. Zacharis Award First Book Prize from Ploughshares. She has published widely and recently has won awards from Yawp Magazine and Georgia University Review.
Soul Train (Carnegie-Mellon) and In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh) were both published in 1997, full of "wry and bittersweet yet overall jubilant poems of memory about growing up as a black girl in an urban neighborhood." (Comstock Review) Yusef Komunyakaa wrote, "These poems point to the strong materials needed to make ourselves whole in the modern world. They alert us to the seams we must tug at to see into ourselves." The Women's Review of Books wrote that "Joseph presents the events of daily life both plainly and transcendently."
Her next collection, Worldly Pleasures (Word Press) and her anthology New Sister Voices: Poetry by American Women of African Descent (SIU) will appear this spring.
She lives and works in Carbondale, Illinois, as Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University and editor of Crab Orchard Review. In 1999 she started the Young Writers Workshop at SIU, a four-day summer program for high school students because she "wanted to recreate that atmosphere of young people writing" from her own high school days.
The Fall Poetry Series, which is sponsored by the English Department of Columbia College Chicago, will continue with Aliki Barnstone on Monday, November 10, and Karen Volkman on Thursday, November 20, also in the Concert Hall at 1014 S. Michigan Avenue. David Trinidad and Jeffery Conway will read on Monday, December 8, in the Herman Conaway Multicultural Center, 1104 S. Wabash. All programs will take place at 5:30 p.m.
Contact:Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383, mleventhal@colum.edu
NOTE: Gunkel is available for interviews.
Chicago, September 2003--Chicago blues, Chicago hot-dogs, Chicago architecture--and Chicago polka. Our homegrown brand of polka is at the forefront of the genre, and polka itself has a political soul, according to Columbia College Chicago Professor Ann Gunkel. In Polka and Cultural Resistance, she weaves together music, videos and photographs to immerse her audience in Polish, Slovenian, German and Tex-Mex polka and to reveal the dance's class awareness. The program will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, October 2 in the Fifth Floor East Meeting Room of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. Admission is free. For more information, call 312-744-6630 or visit www.intersections.colum.edu.
The lyrics and venues of polka today represent one of the few forums of resistance to an all-usurping commodity economy, write Charles and Angeliki Keil, authors of Polka Happiness (Temple University, 1992). Polka is still a proletarian style at roughly the point where blues . . .were in the 1950's. Not a folk dance, not Polish, not dying out, polka is a vibrant multi-ethnic urban genre that crosses generational lines and reinforces working class consciousness.
Dr. Gunkel (M.A., Loyola University, Chicago; Ph.D., DePaul University) is an award winning designer of educational multimedia and a former Fulbright scholar. Publications include work on urban religion, Polish-American children's history, and cyberspace, as well as polka. She co-curated the Witte Museum's queezebox: Accordion Cultures in the U.S. exhibit. She is currently Professor of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago.
Polka and Cultural Resistance is the second presentation in the second year of the adult education series, Intersections: A Meeting Place for Diverse Ideas on Contemporary Culture and the Arts. Intersections, which is a collaboration between the Cultural Studies Program of Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, presents monthly lectures and discussions that investigate and celebrate the complexity of contemporary culture and the arts in which scholars and educators from Columbia College Chicago explore a broad range of compelling topics in a format designed to be informative, invigorating and accessible.
Intersections lectures offer Continuing Education Credit for Illinois Public School Teachers. For information on CE credit, contact Paul Camic, Ph.D. at pcamic@colum.edu.