ACU Poetry Reading
Join us in Glendale, AZ, for an evening with poet Mischa Willett, who will read from his two critically acclaimed collections, Phases and The Elegy Beta, as well as share selections from his latest work. Recognized as a leading voice in contemporary Christian poetry, Willett’s writing explores themes of faith, beauty, and the human experience. Hosted by ACU, the event will include a poetry reading, a book signing, and a discussion about his work and creative process. Joining the program is Phoenix poet Betsy Brown, whose debut collection has just been published! This event will take place in the Rhode Auditorium and is free and open to the public.
What's the best Luxury album? A panel discussion
Join us for an online discussion debating the merits of my favorite punk band.
Luxury is a rock and roll band that is 60% ordained priests. That's interesting, but what's even more interesting is their five exquisite rock and roll records. This event features a discussion and debate among writers, critics, and academics to finally answer the age-old question: "What's the best Luxury record?" Join us on Zoom to find out, as each panelist champions one of Luxury's albums.
Moderator - Alex Stroschein, Regent College
Alan Parish, Turn the Radio Off music blog: Amazing and Thank You
Jon Couts, Ambrose University: The Latest & the Greatest
Mischa Willett, Seattle Pacific University: self-titled
Joel Heng Hartse, Simon Fraser Unviersity: Health & Sport
Michial Farmer, The Christian Humanist podcast: Trophies
Ecology & Religion in Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference
This flightless, multi-site, interdisciplinary conference explores the confluences between environmental and religious perspectives and practices in the long Anglophone nineteenth century (1780-1900).
Poetry Reading with Scott Cairns, Jennifer Maier & Mischa Willett
Just as a painter must first love pigment and form, or a sculptor must love metal, wood, or stone, a poet must first love and trust language.
Romantic Elements | NASSR Chicago
I’ll be presenting a paper at the upcoming North American Society for the Study of Romanticism on the subject outlined below.
An Element of Egotism: Taking the Self out of the Sublime in Late Romanticism
In DeQuincey’s Romanticism, Margaret Russell shows how “the historical permutation of [minor] authorship…is necessarily also a symptom…that profits from the reflexivity it achieves by encoding an account of its own production” (133). Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn,” are the most well-known exemplars of such reflexivity and such profit, but the minor poets who followed them, both in chronology and in style turned this element of reflexivity from “a symptom” to a feature: the whole show. Poets Ebenezer Jones and Alexander Smith particularly made careers out of the origin stories of their own careers turning useful background of successful cultural artifact, as in Coleridge’s “Man from Porlock” gloss, into background as cultural artifact, and successful ones too.
But this essay, which reads Smith’s and Jones’ early poems as attempts by working class (minor) writers to break into Russell’s succession of historical permutation by performing encoded reflexivity, also challenges the received notions about such writers: that they were fame-hungry strivers. It argues, rather, that their poems show a route around the egotistical sublime made so distasteful by Wordsworth. The fame which Keats so sought and Byron so basked in is rejected by their immediate poetic successors as unhealthy. Such grand rejections of authorship as personality, while still performing authorial struggle as spectacle, of course, made them famous.
SPU Faculty Poetry Reading
A group reading/discussion featuring poets at Seattle Pacific University: Scott Cairns, Jennifer Maier, Mischa Willett, Doug Thorpe, Eugene Lemcio. All are welcome! Book signing to follow.
Free admission.
Vine & Verse
Vine & Verse is sponsored through a partnership between Queen Anne Lutheran Church, Queen Anne Presbyterian Church, and Queen Anne Book Company; sensible places all, who have teamed up to make an evening of readings and tastings; this time on the subject of hope. I'll be the featured reader on Nov 6th. Come out if you can!
This event is free and open to the public.
Phases Book Club
A book-club-style discussion of Phases (Cascade Books, 2017), hosted by the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at SPU.
This event is for members of the SPU community--students, faculty, and staff only.
Sign-ups required.
A Reading with Mischa Willett & Lauren Camp
Richard Hugo House and Seattle Pacific University School of Theology present:
Mischa Willett, poet and host of the podcast Poems for the People, and New Mexico-based poet Lauren Camp will read from their recent collections—both of which explore family and migration—followed by an onstage Q&A.
In her Dorset Prize-winning new collection, One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press), Lauren Camp explores the lives of a first-generation Arab-American girl and her Jewish-Iraqi parent. Camp tells overlapping stories of food and ritual, immigration and adaptation, evoking her father’s boyhood in Baghdad in the 1940s at a time when tensions began to emerge along ethnic and religious lines. She also draws upon memories of Sabbath dinners in her grandparents’ new home in America to reveal how family culture persists.
A Reading with Mischa Willett & Jeremiah Webster
Mischa Willett, author of PHASES (Cascade Books, 2017) and Jeremiah Webster, author of AFTER SO MANY FIRES (Anchor and Plume Press, 2017) will read poems from thier respective collections. A Q+A will follow.
The Gates Reading
Mischa Willett, author of *Phases* (Cascade Books, 2017, Wipf and Stock Publishers) gives this year's Gates Reading, an annual series co-sponsored by the English Department at Seattle Pacific University and Image Journal, named in honor of longtime educator Fan Mayhall Gates.
SPU faculty and students established the Fan Gates reading series in 1999 to honor this well-loved professor and colleague after her retirement from the English dept. after 36 years. Funded by the Fan Mayhall Gates Literary Reading Series Endowment, the annual event spotlights prominent writers on the campus of Seattle Pacific.
The poems in *Phases* have been described by the poet Scott Cairns (Paraclete Press) as employing "a surprising linguistic brilliance to compose oratoria that brighten the hearts of readers," and by the poet Kevin J Craft (University of Washington Press) as "rub[bing] shoulders with classical figures and Biblical traditions, stoics and shepherds and sleep-deprived poets, the better to place the old stories in a contemporary light."
Copies of *Phases* can be ordered from Amazon.com or from Wipf and Stock Publishers.
The event is free and open to the public.