Rose Library Presents: Community Conversations

Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Chinese Literature and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Presently, Chin is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book is A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2018). Chin’s other books of poems include Hard Love Province, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Dwarf Bamboo, and the Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty. Her book of wild girl fiction is called Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. She has won numerous awards, including the distinguished Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement in poetry from the Poetry Foundation, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the United States Artist Foundation Award, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, two NEAs, the United Artist Foundation Award, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, a Lannan Residency and others. In 2017, she was honored by the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus and the California Assembly for her activism and excellence in education. Visit her website. Read poems by Marilyn Chin Poetry Foundation Academy of American Poets

Ronald Schuchard, the Goodrich C. White Professor of English and Irish Studies, Emeritus, Emory University, is the author of numerous studies of modern authors, particularly T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. His Eliot’s Dark Angel won the Robert Penn Warren / Cleanth Brooks Prize for outstanding literary criticism, and his The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts won the Robert Rhodes Prize for an outstanding book on Irish literature. He is co-editor with John Kelly of three volumes of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats and general editor of the eight-volume online and print editions of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is presently a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To view the finding aid for Ron's papers, click here. Anthony Cuda is a scholar and university professor who teaches classes on twentieth-century poetry, British and American literature of the modernist period (1900-1945), Dante, and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Passions of Modernism: Eliot, Yeats, Woolf and Mann (University of South Carolina Press, 2010). With Ronald Schuchard, he co-edited of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, The Critical Edition. Vol. II: The Perfect Critic: 1919-1926 (London and Baltimore: Faber & Faber and Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association 2015 Book Prize for an edition, anthology, or collection. Cuda’s reviews of contemporary poetry have appeared in The Washington Post Book World, The New Criterion, FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, The International Poetry Review, and the American Book Review. Learn more here. Other collections discussed in the episode: Finding aid for Seamus Heaney's papers. Finding aid for the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.

Diane Gordon Briggs is the youngest child of Barbara Gordon and astronaut Richard F. Gordon of Gemini XI and Apollo 12. She is a wife, mother of six (like her mom), and a Christian Counselor. Join in with Diane and her closest childhood friend, Tracy L. Scott, as they reminisce over their childhood and their dads’ space adventures during the early days of NASA. Tracy L. Scott is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Emory University. She grew up in Nassau Bay, Texas, as part of the early NASA community (her father, David R. Scott, flew on the Apollo 15 lunar mission). She recently donated her parents' papers from the early NASA era to the Stuart A. Rose Library (see the Finding Aid for those papers here). Dr. Scott will be teaching a course in Spring 2022: “Moon Bound: A Sociology of the Apollo Era.”

Rose Library's Community Outreach Archivist and Community Conversations host, Lolita Rowe sat down with artists Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Carlos Museum curator, Megan O’Neil to explore ideas of community, making connections, collaborative art making, identity, and much more. Explore Marie Watt’s art here. And Cannupa Hanska Luger’s here. For more information on the exhibition Each/Other, which is open to the public through December 12, 2021, visit the Carlos Museum website. Emory University’s Land Acknowledgement Statement

This fall, a major collection of books and papers related to Bram Stoker's iconic novel Dracula, collected by John Moore, opened to the public. Learn more about this collection here and here. Beth Shoemaker is the Rare Book Librarian at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archive & Rare Book Library in Atlanta. Her work includes cataloging, collection development, teaching and curating exhibits in the Emory Libraries. Follow her Rose Library rare books Instagram here. Eddy Von Mueller is a scholar, filmmaker and educator in Atlanta, Georgia. He co-edited How A Monster Became an Icon: The Science and Enduring Allure of Mary Shelley's Creation, and most recently, he directed, produced, and co-wrote with the late curator of Rose Library's African American collections, Pellom McDaniels, Small Steps, "a documentary film about the shocking experiences of a group of Upward Bound students visiting St. Augustine, Fl....in July, 1969."

In this final episode of Season One of Community Conversations, Nick Sturm, NEH Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics at Emory's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, does a deep dive into small press publishing with Maureen Owen, legendary publisher of Telephone Books and Telephone Magazine in New York from 1969-1983, bringing many then-unknown poets' books into the world, including Susan Howe, Patricia Spears Jones, and Yuki Hartman. The Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a part of the Rose Library's literary and poetry collections, recently acquired several Telephone books and magazine issues, which completes the collection, and is the only educational institution to house the complete run. Maureen Owen, former editor and chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, is the author of Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, in Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and co-edited Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night through 19 issues. Her newest title Edges of Water is available from Chax Press. She has most recently had work in Blazing Stadium, Positive Magnets, Posit, and The Denver Quarterly. Click here to learn about her Poets on the Road Tour with Barbara Henning. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website. Her manuscript titled Let the Heart hold Down the Brakage Or The Caregiver’s Log is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press.

In this episode, Nick Sturm (check out his Twitter and website) takes a deep dive into the fascinating history of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, which is housed at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. The Danowski is home to over 75,000 poetry books, 50,000 little magazines, and thousand of broadsides, posters, and other ephemera. The collection was donated to the Rose in 2004, and continues to guide the poetry collecting mission. Nick Twemlow is Poetry and Digital Humanities Librarian at Rose Library, where he is also responsible for literary and poetry collection development. Learn more about the Danowski collection here. This is a fantastic feature on Raymond Danwoski and how the collection came to be: "Raymond Danowski Has Your Chapbook."

Heather Clark is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, which has been shortlisted for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography; The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which was a Choice/American Library Association Outstanding Academic Title; and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972, which won the Donald J. Murphy Prize and Robert Rhodes Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has received a Public Scholar Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Biography Fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, CUNY. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, England, and lives outside of New York City. David Trinidad is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and collaborations. These include Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017), Notes on a Past Life (BlazeVOX [books], 2016), Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point, 2013), and Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point, 2011). Digging to Wonderland is forthcoming from Turtle Point in 2022. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011), which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith (Turtle Point, 2019). Originally from Southern California, Trinidad currently lives in Chicago, where he is a Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College. To explore the Harriet Rosenstein Finding Aid, click here. To do the same with Ted Hughes' papers and to see what materials the Rose Library has of Sylvia Plath's, look here.

Here are links to more information about Pellom McDaniels and collections discussed during this episode: Lifting Every Voice The Inspiration and Impact of Pellom McDaniels III Frederick Douglass: A Bicentennial Tribute Camille Billops and James V. Hatch archives Richard A. Cecil collection

Learn more the Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade archive here.

Jesse R. Peel (1940-) is an HIV positive Atlanta, Georgia, psychiatrist and activist in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community. He was born in Everetts, North Carolina, to J. Woolard (1914-1984) and Helen Peel (1916-2005). He completed his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, graduating from medical school in 1965, completed his internship from 1965-66, and did his residency in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in 1966-69. Peel served in the United States Navy Medical Corps as a lieutenant and did tours in Vietnam (1969-1970) and Okinawa, Japan (1969-1970). He moved to Atlanta in 1976 and was a founding member in AIDS groups such as AID Atlanta and Positive Impact. He also worked with the Lesbian and Gay Funding Initiative, Metropolitan Atlanta Community Foundation AIDS Fund, the Georgia Task Force on AIDS, and the AIDS Legacy project among other groups working to help those affected with the disease. To learn more about his papers, which are collected at Rose Library, click here.

Community Conversations is produced by Lolita Rowe & Nick Twemlow. Jacob Chisenhall is our editor. Music created by Sister Sai. Thank you to Caroline Corbitt for logo designs. We are grateful for the support provided by our colleagues at the Rose Library, Jennifer King, director of the Rose Library and Yolanda Cooper, Dean of Emory Libraries. Special thanks to Nikki Giovanni for her words and insight and to her partner, Virginia Fowler. Also to Gabrielle Dudley for conducting this interview and to the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose by Nikki Giovanni is available now. To learn more about Nikki Giovanni and her upcoming projects, visit www.nikki-giovanni.com

Community Conversations is produced by Lolita Rowe & Nick Twemlow. Jacob Chisenhall is our editor. Music created by Sister Sai. Thank you to Caroline Corbitt for logo designs. We are grateful for the support provided by our colleagues at the Rose Library, Jennifer King, director of the Rose Library and Yolanda Cooper, Dean of Emory Libraries. Special thanks to Nikki Giovanni for her words and insight and to her partner, Virginia Fowler. Also to Gabrielle Dudley for conducting this interview and to the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose by Nikki Giovanni is available now. To learn more about Nikki Giovanni and her upcoming projects, visit www.nikki-giovanni.com