The Colorado College English Department’s annual Visiting Writers Series, sponsored by the MacLean Endowment, returns this year with significant additional support from the Humanities for Our Times Grant.
In January 2022, Mellon Foundation announced that over $16.1 million was awarded to 12 liberal arts colleges as part of the ‘Humanities for All Times’ Initiative. CC received $1,024,000 for its Humanities for Our Times: From Epistemologies and Methodologies to Liberatory Creative Practices and Social Justice project, which supports professional development and CC’s ongoing work towards becoming an antiracist institution. The Visiting Writers Series is one of several programs supported by this grant. Other supported programs include course development, campus-wide events, discussions, and workshops.
The Creative Processes portion of the grant this year is called the Investigations of Creativity Towards Inclusivity Series. The series is guided by several key questions, including how creativity is framed in the different humanities disciplines, how this informs our interaction with the arts on campus, in our community, and towards our students’ futures. It asks how we might expand our understanding of creativity across disciplines and outside of a settler-colonizer framework and how we might embrace a rhizomatic approach to including creativity throughout all disciplines in discernable ways to support creative process requirements.
“These themes have been brimming in the humanities for some time now,” says Dr. Natanya Pulley, Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department, who organized the series. “There have always been questions about how creativity is taught and discussed—and what underlying principles go unnoticed when doing so. The Creative Process general requirement is one way in which the college picked up on these questions, but in the last seven or eight years more conferences, books, and articles in the creative fields have highlighted the need for interrogating our approaches to creativity and the creative process. The Humanities for Our Times grant has given us an opportunity to work through these ideas from different access points. As a professor, I knew a grant like this could go a long way in bringing those conversations to our community.”
The Investigations of Creativity Towards Inclusivity Series also supports staff and faculty book luncheons throughout the year, with the goal of offering insight into the texts via discussion that can be shared in classes and with colleagues and the Colorado Springs community.
“Each of our invited speakers have forged ways to support inclusivity in creative fields by questioning the methods taught in those fields,” Pulley says. “The Series begins with editors and contributors of anthologies who highlight poetics and approaches to creativity within their communities.”
The English Department also looked for writers who push the boundaries of genre or expectation in their works, and who have combatted traditional methods of creative writing for a long time.
“For example, besides being a New York Times bestseller and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, our capstone speaker N.K. Jemisin is the first speculative fiction writer to win three consecutive Novel Hugo Awards for her Broken Earth trilogy,” Pulley says. “Her presence as a writer pushing against conventions of genre and structural racism, among many other topics, and her contributions to Afrofuturism speak to the Investigations of Creativity Towards Inclusivity Series goals. And, of course, she’s an awesome writer and amazing storyteller. We are thrilled for her visit and talk on ‘The Revolutionary Power of Imagination.’”
The Visiting Writers Series hosts blocky visiting writers, but the Humanities for Our Times Grant specifically includes funds for writers who are speaking to the inclusivity in methods of teaching creative writing.
The series begins this month with a Dinétics Panel on Oct. 9 and 10, featuring Esther Belin, Jake Skeets, Dr. Manny Loley, and Dr. Jeff Berglund. The reading will take place on Oct. 9 in Gaylord Hall, beginning at 6 p.m., and the panel will take place on Oct. 10 in the South Hall Commons, beginning at 1 p.m.
The two-day panel investigates Dinétics, which are poetics of Diné writing and storytelling. Before the panel, faculty and staff members are coming together for a book club luncheon to discuss The Diné Reader.
Esther Belin is an award-winning poet and editor. She’s a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Antioch University, and the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Belin says the Diné writing and storytelling process is an essential component to identity.
“I feel so motivated when I hear a story that touches my spirit, that helps me a reach a plateau, that is a companion when I feel vulnerable, or need courage, trust, and love,” Belin says.
Jake Skeets is an award-winning author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. He’s earned a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Arts Projects and a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship. He is the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.
Dr. Manny Loley is an inaugural In-Na-Po Fellow, and a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: Diné Writers’ Collective. His work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Pleaides Magazine, the Massachusetts Review, the Santa Fe Literary Review, Broadsided Press, the Yellow Medicine Review, and the Diné Reader: an Anthology of Navajo Literature, as well as other outlets. He has severed as the director of the Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute since 2018.
Dr. Jeff Berglund’s research and teaching focuses on Native American literature, comparative Indigenous films, and U.S. multi-ethnic literature. He is an English Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. Berglund’s work includes Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality (2006), Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays (co-editor, 2010), Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop (co-editor, 2016), The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature (co-editor, 2021), and Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendancy of Social Media Activism (co-editor, 2021).
Visiting Writers Series Visiting Writers
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Dr. Rueben Quesada, editor of award-winning Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2022), and author of several poetry collections, including Jane/La Segua (2023, digital), Revelations (2018), and Next Extinct Mammal (2011) will speak at South Hall on Dec. 8 at 2 p.m. Quesada’s work has been published in Best American Poetry, New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, Publisher’s Weekly, American Poetry Review, along with other outlets. He has consulted for the Smithsonian, National Endowment for the Arts, National Book Critics Circle, and Lambda Literary Foundation.
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Dr. Matthew Salesses has written and spoken about adoption and race for many outlets, including PBS, NPR’s Code Switch, The New York Times’ Motherlode, VICE, Salon, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, the Center for Asian American Media, and Brown University and Texas State University. Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder, The Hundred-Year Flood, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, and Craft in the Real World. He is also an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University. His reading will take place in the Cornerstone Screening Room on January 31, 2024, at 6 p.m. Faculty and staff members are invited to a book club luncheon to discuss Craft in the Real World on January 26.
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Lan Duong, author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism and Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective and serves as the website editor for the organization. She is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Duong’s poetry has appeared in many outlets, including Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose; Bold Words: Asian American Writing to Span the Centuries; Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing; and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. She will speak at Gaylord Hall on February 28, 2024, at 5 p.m.
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N. K. Jemisin is a New York Times bestselling and multi-time Hugo Award-winning author, and a recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of The Broken Earth Trilogy, The Dreamblood Duology, The Inheritance Trilogy, and The Great Cities, along with others. She was previously the Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Reviewer at the New York Times. Jemisin is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and won the British Fantasy Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2018. Her talk, “The Revolutionary Power of Imagination,” will take place on March 7, 2024, in the Cornerstone Richard F. Celeste Theatre at 7 p.m. Faculty and staff members are invited to a book club luncheon to discuss The City We Became on March 1, 2024.
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Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, which was named a Best Book of 2019 by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 poetry honoree, and was named one of the 50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019 by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and was published this year. Her chapbook, #stringofbeads, which was released from Diode Press this year, won the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition. Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the South Dakota Review. She will give a talk on Rhizomatic Storytelling on April 25, 2024, in the Cornerstone Screening Room at 6 p.m. Faculty and staff members are invited to a book club luncheon on April 17 to discuss tsunami vs. the fukushima 50.
Rone Shavers is the author of Silverfish, which was a finalist for the 2021 Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker Award in fiction. He is an Associate Professor of English at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His work has appeared in many journals, including Action-Spectacle, Another Chicago Magazine, Big Other, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, PANK, and The Vestal Review. Shavers was a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers and Mentoring Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a Nancy B. Negley Writer-in-Residence at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, and an Arthur T. Schwab Poet-in-Residence at MacDowell. Shavers will give a talk on Afrofuturism and Experimental Writing in the Cornerstone Screening Room on May 1, 2024, at 6 p.m.
All talks are open to the public and preregistration is not required.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a regular generous funder of Colorado College. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the country’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities and seeks to build just communities with its grants. For more information on the series or the Humanities For Our Times Grant, please visit the webpage.