Hall Center for The Humanities
Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney – National Book Award-winning poet

September 6, 2012
Woodruff Auditorium, Kansas Union

National Book Award-winning poet and Professor of Creative Writing Nikky Finney seeks to explore the act of  "Making Poetry in our Anthropocene Age." How does the Anthropocene ultimately matter to our human intersections with each other, the natural world, art, and culture?

Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell – Bestselling author and former NPR contributor

October 10, 2012
Woodruff Auditorium, Kansas Union

By examining the connections between the American past and present, Sarah Vowell offers personal, humorous accounts of everything from presidents and their assassins to colonial religious fanatics, as well as thoughts on American Indians, utopian dreamers, pop music, and the odd cranky cartographer.

Robin Rowland

Robin Rowland – Professor of Communication Studies, University of Kansas

October 24, 2012
Woodruff Auditorium, Kansas Union

Rowland will argue that Obama's rhetoric has evolved: the arc has moved from impassioned appeals that created a new sense of Hope, to an audacious call to reaffirm basic fairness in American economic life and therefore save the American Dream.

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt – John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

November 14, 2012
Woodruff Auditorium, Kansas Union

Greenblatt's most recent work, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern received the 2011 National Book Award, and demonstrates how something as seemingly insignificant as a poem could influence the cultural world.

Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat – MacArthur Fellow & author of Breath, Eyes, Memory

March 13, 2013
Woodruff Auditorium, Kansas Union

Danticat, a native of Haiti, came to the United States when she was 12, and it is her moving and insightful depictions of Haiti that have brought the experience of Haitian immigration to the forefront of American literature.

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