Dartmouth Events

Poetic Witnessing of War

Award winning poets will read selected excerpts from their poetry and reflect upon their work as witnesses of war.

2/21/2024
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Virtual Zoom
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Arts and Sciences, Lectures & Seminars

Please e-mail Comparative.Literature@Dartmouth.edu for the Zoom link

February 21, 2024 @ 4:30 pm

Jehanne Dubrow, Professor of English, University of Texas
Author of three books of creative nonfiction and nine books of poems, including Stateside and Dots and Dashes;

Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern ReviewAmerican Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in numerous other venues. Recent essays have appeared in The New England Review, Colorado Review, The Common, The Seneca Review, Image, Guernica, and West Branch. She is the founding editor of the national literary journal, Cherry Tree.

Her writing moves between traditional forms, free verse, prose poetry, lyric essay, auto-theory, and personal essay. In Stateside and Dots & Dashes (and in her forthcoming collection, Civilians), she examines her experiences as a military spouse and explores the tradition of war literature. In books like The Arranged Marriage, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post, she writes about the Shoah, intergenerational trauma, and the challenges of representing violence on the page. Her collections, Wild Kingdom, Simple Machines, American Samizdat, and Red Army Red, consider the intersection of power, cruelty, and authoritarianism. Jehanne is also passionate about the five senses; she has written about the art and science of perfume in through smoke: an essay in notes and about our sense of taste in Taste: A Book of Small Bites. And, in Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity, she looks at the act of looking itself. She is currently at work on a book-length essay about frivolous things, people, and pursuits, Frivolity: A Defense. She is also writing a craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma.

Doug Anderson, writer, taught at several colleges, Vietnam combat veteran
Author of The Moon Reflective Fire, Keep Your Head Down, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police

He served as a combat medic in the Vietnam War, and after Vietnam attended the University of Arizona, where he studied acting. He started writing poetry after he moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, and worked with the poet Jack Gilbert.

Anderson has written about his experiences in the Vietnam War in both poetry and nonfiction. He is the author of the poetry collections The Moon Reflected Fire (1994), the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (2000). In 2009 he published his memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery. His most recent book is Horse Medicine (Barrow Street Press, 2015).

His awards include a grant from the Eric Mathieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Anderson has taught at the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University, and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

For questions, please contact Roberta.L.Stewart@Dartmouth.edu

Sponsors:
The Leslie Center for the Humanities
Comparative Literature Program

For more information, contact:
Roberta Stewart

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.