Aftermath: Narrating Disaster
A Panel with Patricia Smith
Sunday, 31 Jan 2010 at 2:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union
Poet Patricia Smith and Iowa State faculty members Benjamin Percy and David Zimmerman will discuss how themes of violence, destruction, and disaster - personal, cultural, environmental - factor into their writing. The works of all three writers suggest strategies for facing and surviving the aftermath of catastrophic and violent events. Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler, chronicles the human, physical and emotional toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina and was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Part of the Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination.No audio recording available for download or podcast.
View the complete schedule of symposium events:
Things Fall Apart: Finding Beauty in a Broken World
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This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.
Cosponsored By:
- Bioethics Program
- Center for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities
- College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Creative Writers’ Milieu
- Ecology, Evolution & Organismal Biology
- English
- Environmental Studies
- Geological & Atmospheric Sciences
- Humanities Iowa
- LAS Miller Lecture Fund
- MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment
- Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
Stay for the entire event, including the brief question-and-answer session that follows the formal presentation. Most events run 75 minutes.
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