Poet laureate visit
April 11, 2005, 210 Applied Arts
Denise Sweet, Poet laureate of Wisconsin, will be reading from her work.
An Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) enrolled at White Earth, Sweet has given over 200 public readings in the United States, and in Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, and Great Britain. In 1998, she was one of five U.S. writers to be sponsored by the U.S. Embassy to attend the First World Congress of Indigenous Literatures of the Americas held in Guatemala.
Sweet often works with educators in the areas of creativity, diversity, storytelling, drama and indigenous language preservation, particularly in the Great Lakes region and in the Southwest. She coordinated the First Annual Anishinaabeg Symposium on Culture, History and Contemporary Issues co-sponsored by UW-Green Bay and UW-Eau Claire in 1998-99.
From 1998-2003, Sweet was co-director of the National Native Writers and Artists Forum and the National Native American Performing Arts Festival, both associated with the Navajo Nation and Telluride Institute.
Her collection of poems, Songs for Discharming, won the First Book Award from Returning the Gift: The Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and also received the Posner Award for Poetry of the Wisconsin Council of Writers. Her poems and fiction have been published in collections and in numerous periodicals and literary publications.
In 2001, Sweet was awarded a year's sabbatical from UW-Green Bay to work on a now-completed manuscript, "As Those With Faith Will Do: Selected Poetry and Prose." She is at work on another collection, "Travelling: The Up North Poems."
Sweet's activities include serving as narrator for video productions for Wisconsin Public Television and the Wisconsin State Historical Society. She had a featured role in a full-length feature film, "Black Cloud," directed and produced by Ricky Schroeder, scheduled for release in limited theaters sometime this year.
Sweet joined the UW-Green Bay faculty in 1990. She is a member of the English, Humanistic Studies and American Indian Studies faculties. Sweet is a former chairperson of American Indian Studies and a former adviser to the student literary magazine and student Writer's Union. She has co-instructed travel seminars among the Mayan peoples in Mexico and Guatemala. Sweet also founded a summer workshop at UW-Green Bay for young adolescent writers, especially students of color.
The reading is being sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy through a grant from the Dean of Arts and Sciences and The Women's Studies Program at UW-Stout.
Refreshments will be served, courtesy of Multiculural Student Services.
Jennifer Brantly
March 3, 2005, Furlong Art Gallery
Jennifer Brantley, a nationally published poet, critic, and essayist read from Lake Superior’s Moods and Latitudes: A Woman’s Search for Water, a mixed-genre manuscript centered on Lake Superior that will be completed this summer
A native of North Carolina, Brantley is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She is the editor of Literary Magazine Review, a twenty-year old national magazine, and her poetry has been published in North American Review, 13th Moon, Hurricane Alice, Women and Language, Genre, Kaleidoscope, Living Forge, and other magazines. Her scholarly work includes an article on Gloria Naylor in Everything Got Four Sides: The Early Novels of Gloria Naylor (University Press of Florida) and “Clorox The Dishes: A Defense of Snow Falling on Cedars” in Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints, vol. 2, Scarecrow Press, 2002. For her poetry, she has won a Hart Crane award and an Academy of American Poets Award (University of Nebraska-Lincoln). Presently she is co-editing an anthology of Women’s Literature to be published by Houghton-Mifflin.
The reading was sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy, the Furlong Gallery, and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, UW-Stout, Menomonie, WI.
Poetry Reading
February 17, 2005, Furlong Art Gallery
Robert Schuler, Professor of English at UW-Stout and an internationally known poet, read from two new collections of his poems, dance into heaven and Songs of Love. dance into heaven will appear in February from Juniper Press of St. Paul, MN. Songs of Love will be published in August 2005 by Tiger’s Eye Press, Sacramento, CA.
Copies of dance into heaven, along with previous collections of Schuler’s poems, were available after the reading for purchase and signing.
The reading was sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy, the Furlong Gallery, and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, UW-Stout, Menomonie, WI.