March is Women’s History Month and April is National Poetry Month, and Black Mountain Institute nods to both with a spring speaker lineup centered on those topics.
Women dominate the literary center’s March roster, with a talk about literary genre-blending by poet and essayist Megan O’Rourke (March 2), who began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker; a reading by emerging author Catherine Lacey (March 10); a book launch of The Profiteers by Las Vegas author and journalist Sally Denton (March 11); and a panel called “Breaking Silence: Women Writing on Crime, Conspiracy, Cruelty” (March 14), in which The Argonauts author Maggie Nelson, The New Yorker writer Eliza Griswold and Denton will explore society and culture through the stories of silenced women, in a talk moderated by BMI co-founder Carol Harter.
The month’s sole male speaker, BMI spring resident and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Gregg Jones, will review his recent work in a March 18 lunch talk called “The Delectable Intellectual.”
April is poetry-heavy, with an alumni reading by poet Heather Winterer (April 7) and a lecture on poet Thomas J. Wise (April 19), as well as “Carrying Over: Poetry in Translation” (April 21), featuring Claudia Keelan, Donald Revell, Peter Golub, Don Bogen and Gillian Conole.
Though we’re not sure what’s observed in May, on May 5, George Packer, Brian Turner, Siobhan Fallon and Phil Klay will talk war stories in “Echoes of Homer: The New Literature of War.”
For more information on BMI’s upcoming events, visit blackmountaininstitute.org.
