Zoom link: https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMldu6orTgsGNMut4fgQShAd7iYnLydjvpS

Anti-Racist Assignment/Activity Create-athon: Creating anti-racist classroom spaces and assignments doesn’t simply happen. This is work that we have to plan ahead for. This Create-athon aims to help us set aside time to do just that - plan ahead to build inclusion and equity into our assignments and activities for the upcoming spring semester, with a specific focus on better supporting Black students on campus. This semester’s focus is in line with EGSOs aim to work in solidarity with Black students currently leading the way in pushing UK to address its issues with anti-Black racism. (Note that future create-athons and workshops may focus on supporting students from a range of marginalized groups at UK.) We will start at 10:00 a.m. and end at 4:00 p.m. with built-in lunch and snack breaks as we go. We will build and workshop assignments together and we will each leave with at least one new and/or revamped anti-racist assignment or activity to use in our classes in the spring. MAs, MFAs, and PhDs all welcome!

Details and Zoom link forthcoming.

The 2016 election was traumatic for many students, leaving instructors handling classroom tensions and student emotions for which they received no formal training. This election cycle has raised similar emotions, intensified by a higher degree of anxiety as Election Day approaches. This workshop will discuss pedagogical practices for both short term and long term post-election ramifications. In the short term, instructors need to manage student anxiety, emotional responses to the election, and maintain a safe classroom environment, while protecting their own mental health. In the long-term, curriculum on media literacy, political engagement, and social justice offer substantive ways to respond to the current political climate.

Zoom link:  https://uky.zoom.us/j/96152011641

Critical Compassion, a Deeper Dive: Our students are experiencing multiple traumas right now: the global pandemic, the United States’ racial reckoning, and the tensions of this highly fraught election year. How can we, as instructors, best help and engage our students in this uniquely tense season? In this session we will watch CELT’s presentation from July on “Critical Compassion and the Pedagogy of People,” followed by a discussion of how we can best utilize these practices in our English, Creative Writing, and WRD classrooms.

https://uky.zoom.us/j/91668962948

Contact Robin for Zoom link.

“...while Black, is a story-telling event about life as an American living in America and subject to ongoing terrorism inflicted by other Americans. ...while Black is a curated evening of dramatic readings, poetry and spoken word, written and performed by people with varying perspectives and firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be a Black Person living, shopping, driving, and thriving in America. “

Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0SNMe_pFRSWL7MKUyFurMQ

Cinelle Barnes, Minda Honey, Kiese Laymon, and Joy Priest

Thursday, Nov. 5th, 2020 7:00pm

Sponsored in collaboration with the Gaines Center for the Humanities 

By Titus W. Chalk

The English Department’s MFA in Creative Writing in the College of Arts & Sciences sponsors the series. Given the health risks associated with live readings, organizers are taking this mainstay of campus literary life online.

“This shows our determination to continue the high calibre and diverse guests our Visiting Writers Series has become known for, in a virtual format,” said Frank X Walker, the new director of Creative Writing. “We’ll also be adding master classes and workshops to ensure a lively literary scene at UK despite COVID-19.”

The events will be held via Zoom webinar with a reading and question-and-answer session from participants.

The Gaines Center & Visiting Writers Series Featuring Cinelle Barnes, Minda Honey, Joy Priest and Kiese Laymon: 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, via Zoom.

The event will mark the release of the essay anthology A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South, edited by Barnes. You can register for the  event here:

https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7QlZg5x-TgakEg27RJIfzQ

Cinelle Barnes is from Manila, Philippines. She is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir (Little A, 2018) and Malaya: Essays On Freedom (Little A, 2019), and she is the editor of A Measure of Belonging (Hub City Press, 2020). She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, Hyphen, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her work has received fellowships and grants from VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, and the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant.

Minda Honey is the founder of TAUNT, a local indie outlet for Louisville, Kentucky. She has a series of essays for Longreads on dating and politics, and her writing has been featured by The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Oxford American, Teen Vogue. Every other week, she tackles the dating woes of strangers as her city's relationship advice columnist at the LEO Weekly. Her work is featured in Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger by Seal Press and in the forthcoming collection from Hub City Press, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South. Honey lives in Louisville, where she serves as the director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University. 

Joy Priest grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, on the backside of the world’s most famous horseracing track. She is the author of Horsepower, winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP, and a 2019-2020 Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems and essays appear in Callaloo, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, and Third Coast, and have been anthologized in Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, and Best New Poets 2014 and 2016.

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. It was named a best book of 2018 by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly. Laymon’s debut novel, Long Division, which will be reissued in 2021, received the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Laymon is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Oxford American. A graduate of Oberlin College, he holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University. He is the Hubert H. McAlexander chair of English at the University of Mississippi and recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard.

The Visiting Writers Series began in spring 2014 with a reading by poet Roger Reeves. Over the past eight years, the MFA in Creative Writing has hosted nationally renowned poets and writers, adding to the vibrant literary culture of Lexington. All Visiting Writers Series events are free and open to the public. For more, see the UK English Department website at https://english.as.uky.edu/visiting-writers-series or follow the series on social media @ukyvws.