Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of ”Heads of the Colored People,” which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and the Art Siedenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times. Her collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, and several other prizes. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Professor Thompson-Spires earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The Root, The White Review, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications, and work is forthcoming in multiple anthologies. Professor Thompson-Spires is the Richards Family Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, teaching creative writing in both the MFA and undergrad programs.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading
Event Overview
The works of both Professor Mort and Professor Thompson-Spires explore the power of personal stories to challenge historical narratives and collective identities.
Professor Mort will read from her most recent collection, “Music for the Dead and Resurrected,” described by the publisher as a “book of letters to the dead” in which “the prize-winning poet relearns how to mourn those erased by violent history” and hopes to create a space of coping and awakening.
Professor Thompson-Spires will read from her most recent book, “Heads of the Colored People,” an award-winning short-story collection that offers a strong sense of the range of contemporary Black literature and Black culture and encourages readers to move beyond reading to activism.
The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory. This is the first virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together.
Speakers
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, who writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three poetry collections: ”Factory of Tears,” ”Collected Body,” and most recently ”Music for the Dead and Resurrected.” Professor Mort’s work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Amy Clampitt Fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine. She has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Granta, and many more. Professor Mort translates among English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, ”Air Raid.” With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Professor Mort co-edited ”Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose.” Her poetry collections have come out in translation in Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine, while single poems have been translated into a dozen languages. Outside the U.S., Professor Mort has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and the Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia). She is an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University.
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