Sue Hart Memorial Reading and Lecture Series

Reading, March 22, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press) and the forthcoming The Cloud Path (Milkweed Editions), as well as a collection of essays Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision. Her first full length nonfiction book, Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear, explores the cultural, labor, and environmental histories of clothing materials provided by animals. She is also the editor of two anthologies: I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Global Human Rights and Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. She was Montana Poet Laureate from 2019-2021, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry and an M.A. in Literature from the University of Montana.

Kwasny is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Award and Alice Fay di Castognola Award for a work in progress, an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, the Montana Art Council's Artist's Innovation Award, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Ucross, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught poetry as visiting writer at both the undergraduate and graduate level, including MFA programs at the University of Wyoming, Eastern Washington University/Inland Pacific Center for Writers, and the University of Montana. She was recently awarded an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellowship.

Lecture: Cosmovisions of Amazonia, March 29, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Join Shawi philosopher Rafael Chanchari Pizuri, and poet, folklorist, and filmmaker Juan Carlos Galeano, for a reading and discussion concerning the cosmologies of Amazonian peoples, as detailed and described in written and visual arts. The discussion will focus on animals, plants, and spiritual practices as embodied in traditional stories adapted to modern times by the people of the great river systems of South America.

Born in the Peruvian Amazon, Rafael Chanchari Pizuri is a philosopher from the Shawi ethnic group, whose spiritual ecological discourse, rooted in cosmovisions of the Indigenous cultures of the Peruvian Amazon, foregrounds the current environmental challenges and complex symbolic narratives of Indigenous Amazonians. He is also an herbalist, community leader, and teacher, who has contributed significantly to the education of indigenous bilingual teachers of many ethnic groups in the Zungarococha Formabiap school in Iquitos, Peru. With Jeremy Narby, he authored Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge.

Juan Carlos Galeano is a poet, essayist, and filmmaker born in the Amazon region of Colombia. Over a decade of fieldwork on the symbolic narratives of riverine and forest people in the Amazon basin resulted in a comprehensive collection of stories (Folktales of the Amazon, 2009; Cuentos amazónicos 2016); two documentary films (The Trees Have a Mother and Él Rio), both featuring Chanchari. His poetry inspired by Amazonian cosmologies and the modern world has been anthologized and published in international journals such as Casa de las Américas (Cuba), The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares (U.S.). He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he teaches Latin American poetry and Amazonian Cultures at Florida State University.

Lecture: A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle, April 11, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey is an Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University Billings where she teaches a broad range of literature and writing classes including Shakespeare and Transatlantic Literature. Raised in Missoula, Montana, she received master’s degrees in English and History from the University of Montana before earning a doctorate in English from Washington State University in 2017. She taught at WSU Tri-Cities for three years and then worked as an Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State University before returning to her home state.

Lodine-Chaffey focuses on early modern cultural understandings of death, public execution, gender, and animals. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Marlowe Studies, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, the Ben Jonson Journal, Parergon, Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, and several edited collections. Her most recent publication “Teaching Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko as Execution Narrative” can be found in Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide. Her first book, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England was published in 2022 as part of the Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture series.

Reading, April 18, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of 13 books, including the New York Times best-sellers, Canada, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land. His work has received many awards and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Carnegie Gold Medal, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. His novels and stories are translated into 35 languages, and abroad have won the Princess of Asturias Prize in Spain, The Prix Femina in France, the La Letera Prize in Italy, and the Siegfried Lenz Prize in Germany. His short stories are widely anthologized. He is also a cultural journalist and essayist, routinely writing in Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Irish Times. Until recently, he was the Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is married to Kristina Ford. They live in Billings and in New Orleans.

Reading, April 24, LA 205, 6:30 pm

David Axelrod was born in 1958 in Alliance, Ohio, where he grew up working in his family’s auto wrecking business, and now resides in Missoula, Montana. Educated in public schools, he studied with Richard Hugo and Patricia Goedicke at the University of Montana, where he earned his MFA. He obtained a Ph.D in Modern Literatures from Ohio University. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Years Beyond the River. He is also the author of two collections of nonfiction; most recently, The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence.

He recently wrote the introduction to About People: Photographs, by the late Gert Berliner.

Axelrod taught at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande from 1988 to 2020, as well as at the Ludwigsburg Educational University in Baden-Würrtemburg, Germany. Along with his spouse and colleague, Jodi Varon, he founded the award-winning basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts. They also are co-founders of EOU’s low residency Master’s Program in Creative Writing, as well as the Wilderness, Ecology and Community program, affiliated with the MFA. He currently serves as the director of the MFA and WEC and is a contributing editor to Lynx House Press.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell attended Pacific Lutheran and Oregon State universities, and holds graduate degrees from Portland State University and the University of Massachusetts. He is author of thirteen collections of poems, including newly released Book of Beginnings and Ends, and also The Grief of a Happy Life, Love’s Last Number, Gaze, and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010).

Howell has received the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Washington State Book Award, two National Endowment Fellowships, two fellowships from the Artist Trust, the Vachel Lindsey and Helen Bullis Prizes, and a number of other fellowships and awards. His work has made three appearances in the annual Pushcart Prize collection, and may be found in many journals and more than forty-five anthologies.

A military journalist during the Vietnam War, since 1975 Howell has been director and principle editor for Lynx House Press. He lives in Spokane, where, since 1996, he has been a member of Eastern Washington University’s Master of Fine Arts faculty.

For more information contact: Tami Haaland, Montana State University Billings, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences at 406-657-2948 or email thaaland@msubillings.edu.

See also:

MSUB launches Sue Hart Memorial Lecture Series