Arts and Cultural Events

Submitted by: Scott Austin, saustin@uca.edu on 09/26/2023

Griffin Planetarium shows this Friday September 29 and Saturday September 30 at 7:00pm: The one-hour shows this week include a tour of the current sky, a review of some of the James Webb Space Telescope images, and the full-dome movie “Seeing!” which investigates light, the human eye and brain narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The planetarium is located in the Conway Corporation Center for the Sciences. Seating starts 10 minutes before show time. Admission is free. Seating limited to the first 94. No admission after the shows begin. No food or drink allowed.

https://uca.edu/physics/planetarium/

Submitted by: Michael Blanchard, blanchardmd@netscape.net on 09/22/2023

On Oct. 3-4, the University of Central Arkansas School of Language and Literature, along with the UCA Creative Writing Program, will host a campus visit by internally acclaimed poet, editor, translator, and human rights advocate Carolyn Forché.

Highlight of Forché’s visit will be a public reading and book signing as part of SLANT’s Visiting Poet Series at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 3, in the Concert Hall of the Windgate Center for Fine & Performing Arts on the UCA campus.

Two other events of note during Forché’s visit will be as follows:

– A Master Class for graduate students in Language, Literature & Creative Writing: 4 p.m., Oct. 3, Thompson Hall 331

– A craft talk to undergraduate students in Language, Literature & Creative Writing: 10 a.m., Oct. 4, Black Box Theatre of the Windgate Center

An American by birth and principal residence, Forché has earned an international reputation. She has given poetry readings in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Belarus, Finland, Sweden, Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Libya, Japan, Colombia, Mexico and Canada. Her poetry books have been translated into Swedish, German and Spanish. Individual poems have been translated into more than twenty other languages.

She is the author of five books of poetry to date, the most recent of which is In the Lateness of the World (2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her debut collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and was subsequently published by Yale University Press. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), published with the help of Margaret Atwood, received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was also the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. That collection includes poems describing what she had personally experienced in El Salvador at the beginning of the twelve-year Salvadoran Civil War.
Forché has translated the works of several poets from other countries, including those from Palestine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and France. Her original poetry and her translations are often placed in the service of her human rights work. Her literary effort is often referred to as political poetry, but she prefers the term “poems of witness.”

She is also an editor and compiled the widely acclaimed anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, first published by W.W. Norton in 1993 and still used as a textbook in colleges and universities throughout the nation. More recently, she collaborated with Ukrainian-born poet Ilya Kaminsky to edit the collection In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine, published by Arrowsmith Press earlier this year.

Her memoir about her time in El Salvador, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Truth and Resistance, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2019 and won the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

Forché’s visit is made possible by a grant from the Artist in Residency Fund of the UCA College of Art, Humanities & Social Sciences. SLANT is the UCA journal of contemporary poetry.

For more information, contact Michael Blanchard, adjunct faculty in English and editor of SLANT, at mblanchard@uca.edu.

 

Submitted by: Guo-ou Zhuang, gzhuang@uca.edu on 09/25/2023

Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Cake Festival or Moon Festival, is one of China’s biggest holidays. A joyous occasion for celebration with family reunions, mooncakes, and lanterns, the festival is also celebrated in many other Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Philippines.
The Center for Chinese Language and Culture at UCA will host a celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival on Friday, September 29th in the Ballroom at the McCastlain Hall. Come to enjoy our celebration with storytelling, live music performance, and mooncakes.

 

Submitted by: Paige Rose, prose@uca.edu on 09/25/2023

Join us on the Keystone Steps in Windgate Thursday for the next Keystone Conversation! Check out these informal, but extremely meaningful conversations, as Dr. Christine Busser from the UCA School of Communication will lead an important and timely topic with guests from the Arkansas Humanities Council, as well as Dr. Sharon Mason from UCA Philosophy and Religion and Dr. Peter Lang from the UCA School of Language and Literature.