Talk: Strange Flowers in the Necropastoral

The Elliston Poetry Room is located in Suite 646 on the 6th Floor of Langsam Library on the UC Uptown Campus at 2911 Woodside Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45221. Public parking is available in the Woodside Garage beneath Langsam Library, or along Martin Luther King Drive on the north edge of the Uptown Campus. An elevator in Woodside Garage will take you to Floor 4 (ground level) and once inside Langsam Library another elevator can take you to floor 6.

Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's recent book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001, while her verse play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists in 2014. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She also collaborated with Don Mee Choi on translations of two short stories by Korean modernist Yi Sang, featured in Yi Sang: Selected Works from Wave Books alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita to Jane Wong, Destiny Hemphill and Valerie Hsuing. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.

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Host or Publisher University of Cincinnati English Department