Each year since 1986, the Zale Writer-in-Residence Program has brought to the Newcomb/Tulane campus a renowned woman writer to spend a week in our community. This Fall, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of this amazing program with a gala return by three Zale writers, Joanna Scott, Linda Hogan and Sonia Sanchez. Their readings and discussions will celebrate the power of language to act “against forgetting” and to clarify for us as citizens and as humans the political and ethical stakes in the challenges of our times.
In Spring 2005, Ellen Gilchrist will be on campus as the 20th Zale Writer-in-Residence and the Distinguished Tulane Mellon Professor in the Humanities.
The Zale Writer-in-Residence Program was established by Dana Zale Gerard, Newcomb 1985, and has been supported by annual gifts from from the M. B. and Edna Zale Foundation of Dallas, Texas. The program is facilitated on campus by a committee of students, faculty, and staff organized through the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women.
SHAKE LOOSE MY SKIN is convened by Mab Segrest, Distinguished Visting Tulane Mellon Professor in the Humanities and “Zale Critic-in-Residence.” While at Tulane, Dr. Segrest is teaching a seminar on “The Local South and the Global South,” the texts for which are drawn from the works of Zale Writers.
Friday, NOVEMBER 19, 4 PM
“Narratives, Rhythms, Histories – the Global in the Local”
A CONVERSATION AMONG ZALE WRITERS
with Mab Segrest, Distinguished Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Moderator
Freeman Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center, Newcomb College
Reception following at Newcomb College Center for Research on Women
Mab Segrest will host a discussion with Hogan, Sanchez, and Scott about how they link, perform and evoke “history.” They will explore together how the voices and narratives in their fiction and poetry are part of larger global patterns of exploitation and resistance, grief and celebration, stasis and change. A reception at the Center for Research on Women will follow the discussion.
Friday NOVEMBER 19, 8 PM
GALA PERFORMANCE OF ZALE WRITERS
Shake Loose Our Skin: A Litany and Celebration drawing together the visions and work of Linda Hogan, Sonia Sanchez, and Joanna Scott
Music by Eluard & Company, Choreography by Yvahn Martin, N ’03
Concept and text selection by Mab Segrest
Dixon Auditorium, Dixon Hall, Newcomb College
The returning writers will join forces with New Orleans jazz musicians Eluard & Company and dancer/choreographer Yvahn Martin to (in the words of Sanchez) to “shake loose our skin.” The text of the evening’s performance is drawn from passages from Sanchez’s poetry of resistance and desire, Hogan’s novel Power that describes a young indigenous woman’s decision to return to traditional ways, and Scott’s novel The Closest Possible Union that narrates the Middle Passage from the point of view of the ship owner’s adolescent son. These disparate and powerful narrative voices, together with music and movement, will manifest the power of art to name, mourn and challenge cruelty and injustice as well as to invoke and celebrate a fuller humanity.
Saturday NOVEMBER 20, 11 AM – 1 PM
WRITERS ON LOCATION: Zale Writers and Tulane students
in collaboration with students at McMain Secondary School
Auditorium, Eleanor McMain Secondary School Auditorium, South Claiborne and Nashville Avenues
Literature and creative writing students from Eleanor McMain Secondary School will host Hogan, Sanchez, Scott, and Segrest for readings and conversation about how, what, and why they write. There will be a booksigning afterward, and a light lunch will be served.
All are high school students and their families and teachers are welcome to participate. Non-McMain students, please RSVP 504 865 5238.
Books by Linda Hogan, Sonia Sanchez, Joanna Scott and Mab Segrest will be available at the Friday events on the Tulane campus, and are available now at the Tulane Bookstore and Maple Street Books.
LINDA HOGAN, a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist, is widely considered to be one of the most influential and provocative Native American figures in the contemporary American literary landscape. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Mean Spirit, she teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
SONIA SANCHEZ is a major and prolific American poet whose body of work and activism bridges the Black Arts Movement and the hip-hop generation. She is Professor Emerita at Temple University in Philadelphia.
JOANNA SCOTT writes haunting and precisely-researched novels about the truths we think we know and the conflicted desires that they produce. A MacArthur Fellow and Lannan Award winner, Scott is Roswell S. Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
MAB SEGREST is chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at Connecticut College in New London. She earned her doctorate in English from Duke University. Her first book, My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, is considered the first book of feminist literary criticism of southern literature. Her second book, Memoir of a Race Traitor, was named an outstanding book on human rights. Her most recent book, Born to Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice, is based on her travels in Africa, Asia, and the United States and reflects on the tremendous changes society is witnessing now and how it can envision more human and just alternatives to our current systems. Before rejoining the academy in 1998 as a visiting professor at Duke, Segrest was instrumental in the feminist small press movement and a founding member of Feminary: A Lesbian Feminist Journal for the South. She is the founder of North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, served on the Board of the Center for Democratic Renewal, and served as the coordinator of the Urban-Rural Mission, a program of the World Council of Churches.
Newcomb College Center for Research on Women | Tulane University