An Occasional Broadsheet
William G. Cooper, Jr., Honors Program in English, UALR
October 2006 (No. 26)
COOPER SPEAKER FOR FALL 2006: JOY HARJO
The only Cooper speaker's visit this fall is coming up. I expect to see all stipend holders there.
The Cooper Program is co-sponsoring a public reading/lecture by poet, artist, screenwriter, and musician Joy Harjo, a member of the Muskogee (Creek) tribe.
Titled "Writing, Singing, Speaking and Dreaming the Next World into Place," the presentation is at 5:30 pm on Friday 20 October 2006 in Donaghey Student Center Meeting Room A. Free and open to the public.
Joy Harjo's accomplishments and publications are almost too numerous to mention. Her most recent books are How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001 (Norton, 2002) and A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales (Norton, 2001).
She founded the band Poetic Justice that combines music with poetry, and she has written many screenplays including the script A Thousand Roads (2005), made for the National Museum of the American Indian. This script won the 2005 Writer of the Year Award: Film Script from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers.
Her book In Mad Love and War (1990) won the National Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. She claims as
some of her literary influences Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, and Galway Kinnell. For more information, see her official website at http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/joy/.
RELATED EVENTS
The annual Sequoyah Research Center Symposium on Native American history, literature, journalism, and preservation runs Thursday 19 to Saturday 21 October. Hear indigenous authors, scholars, leaders, activists, and archivists from all over the USA and elsewhere. Free and open to the public. For information and the conference program, go to http://www.anpa.ualr.edu.
COOPER SEMINAR & SPEAKER FOR SPRING 2007
In spring 2007, Dr. Jim Levernier will teach the Cooper seminar The Alternative American Canon on Thursdays from 12:15 to 2:55, place TBA. He will also host a public lecture and class visit by Dr. Lorrayne Carroll, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, author of Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History (forthcoming, Kent State University Press) and of many articles on early American literature, pedagogy, and globalism.
UALR UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH EXPO 2007
The second UALR Undergraduate Research EXPO will take place on 16 April 2007. Last year's EXPO included poster presentations by 58 students including half a dozen from the Cooper Program. Please be thinking about submitting your projects for presentation in the spring. Further details will be announced later.
DR. VANNATTA'S PROGRESS
I'm happy to report that Dr. Vannatta is progressing well after his recent surgery. Expect him to be fighting fit by the spring semester when he resumes teaching.
COOPER COMPUTER ROOM
The Cooper Computer Room in the English Department suite is still under-used. Come in to this quiet, comfortable space and make use of the new computers and printers.
STUDENT NEWS
- RAIN STORY is having a blast at the University of New Mexico. She's working hard at her graduate studies in Spanish but also (as she says in her e-mails) attending many fiestas!!
- DENIES GASKINS presented his research project for the 2006 McNair Baccalaureate Achievement Program at the McNair Symposium in September. His project is titled "'A Comfortable Evil': Tracing Desire in
the Soaphead Church Episode of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye."
COOPER 10TH ANNIVERSARY
Spring 2007 marks the 10th anniversary
of the first Cooper students that graduated from the Program. I am compiling a celebratory booklet of information about the Program, its graduates and activities. If you have any information about what past Cooper graduates are doing now, please pass it on to me. The Program will also organize a special anniversary event.
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