MCC’s Creative Arts Committee and the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Project are proud to welcome celebrated poet Elana Bell to campus on Thursday, October 18th and Friday, October 19th. Bell’s first collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was the recipient of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award given annually to a first-collection of poetry. Of Bell, renowned author Fanny Howe wrote that she “has undertaken a task many others have avoided: facing the agony of the Palestine-Israel conflict and its history. She has done so in the only way it is possible: by writing with the detached but compassionate voice of a translator. She gives her voice over to others without changing her vocabulary or her beat, and in this way excludes herself from the subject matter. There are only occasional glimpses of the personal, and these are often self-critical, and lacking in certainty. Elements basic to life—bread, fruit, water, and rats—are here in profusion. These poems are built for our time.”
Bell has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including those from the Jerome Foundation and the Edward Albee Foundation, and her work has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, and CALYX Journal, among others. Bell has conducted poetry workshops for educators, women in prison, and the Arab Jewish Peace Organization, Seeds of Peace. She currently serves as the writer-in-residence for the Bronx Academy of Letters.
Elana Bell: A Public Reading
Thursday, October 18th
7pm
Flynn Campus Center Forum (3-130)
FREE and open to the public
Elana Bell: A Student Workshop
Friday, October 19th
12pm
8-200, Brighton Campus
FREE and open to the public
For more information, please contact Tony Leuzzi ("mailto:aleuzzi@monroecc.edu" or 292-3392).
Regina Fabbro
English/Philosophy
10/16/2012 |