Community

DETROIT, Mich., March 22, 2011— Marygrove's English and Modern Languages Department is pleased to announce that the award-winning poet and literary scholar, Harryette Mullen, will be the twenty-third guest in its Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series.

Her innovative poems challenge us to rethink our ideas about gender, race, language, politics, and popular culture by engaging in wordplay: puns, jokes, acrostics, and anagrams. Commenting on Mullen's incisive experimentation with language, Elisabeth A. Frost has written, "Crossing the lines between often isolated aesthetic camps, Harryette Mullen has pioneered her own form of bluesy, disjunctive lyric poetry, combining a concern for the political issues raised by identity politics with a poststructuralist emphasis on language." As Carol Muske-Dukes says, Mullen's poetry is "a little like the Muse playing scrabble."

Harryette Mullen will deliver the Lillian and Don Bauder Lecture at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 15, 2011, in Alumnae Hall on the Marygrove College campus. Afterward, she will sign copies of her works, which will be available for purchase. This event is free and open to the community.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of five books of poetry, Harryette Mullen has taught at Cornell University and now teaches creative writing and African-American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has received the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and the 2010 Jackson Poetry Prize, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

Mullen was born in Alabama and raised in Texas. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Texas, Austin and her master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

ABOUT THE SERIES

This series, now in its twenty-third year at Marygrove, is an annual event bringing a nationally-known author to its campus for a public lecture and seminar with students. It began when the late Frederick P. Currier, a former Marygrove College trustee, attended a reception on campus and remarked that he would like to bring a national writer to Marygrove for a weekend. Mr. Currier’s start-up check soon followed his suggestion, and in 1989 nearly 600 guests of the College heard Gloria Naylor inaugurate the series.

To date, nearly 10,000 people have joined Marygrove at the Friday night public readings to hear outstanding writers share their work.

For more information: http://www.marygrove.edu/contemporary_American_authors/index.htm or contact Professor Frank Rashid at (313) 927-1448.