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Roger Reeves, Yogita Goyal to visit Penn State on Feb. 22

Award-winning poet and African-American scholar will examine contemporary human rights crises through historical lens of slavery

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Award-winning poet Roger Reeves and African American scholar Yogita Goyal will visit Penn State this month to read from and discuss their work at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 22, in 160 Willard Building.

During the event, Goyal will present research from her forthcoming scholarly book, “Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery,” which examines the emergence of Atlantic slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. Reeves, author of the Pushcart Prize-winning poem “The Field Museum,” will read from and speak about his poetry. Following their individual presentations, Goyal and Reeves will discuss their work in tandem and will respond to questions from the audience.

Goyal is associate professor of African-American studies and English at UCLA, editor of the journal Contemporary Literature, and vice president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.). In addition to her forthcoming book, she is the author of “Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature” (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She has also been guest editor of a special issue of Research in African Literatures (Fall 2014) and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017).

Reeves, currently associate professor of English at the University of Texas, is the author of “King Me” (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Best American Poetry, and the Indiana Review, among other publications. Reeves previously received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, a Cave Caaem Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; he was also a 2014-2015 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

The evening with Reeves and Goyal is the latest event sponsored by the Penn State Department of African American Studies’ Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance Sawyer Seminar Series. The series, funded largely through a grant provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks to identify and examine ways that marginalized racial subjects in the Americas disrupt the logic of disposability creatively, politically, and intellectually using practices of organized resistance and an everyday politics of refusal. Additional information about “Racial Disposability” can be found on the series website or by contacting Cynthia Young, associate professor and head of the Department of African American Studies, at cay9@psu.edu.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by the Modern and Contemporary Studies Initiative at Penn State.

Last Updated February 14, 2018

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