UM Race and Creative Writing Conference:

Fence Talk & Reading: A Conversation Between John Keene & Ed Pavlic. 11 am - 12:50 pm.

John Keene is the author of the award-winning novel Annotations (New Directions), and, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, of the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press). He has published his fiction, poetry, essays, and translations in a wide array of journals, and his honors include numerous fellowships, including a 2003 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2005 Whiting Foundation Award in Fiction and Poetry. A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective of Cambridge and Boston, and a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, he has taught at Brown University; Northwestern University, where he served as Director of the undergraduate Creative Writing Program and Acting Co-Director of the Masters in Creative Writing Program; and other institutions. He served on the inaugural juries for the Cave Canem Second Book Prize and the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, both published by Northwestern University Press. He also is a member of the planning and organizational committee for the African Poetry Book Series, under the auspices of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner. His introduction to the first published English translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst's writing, her novel The Obscene Madame D appeared in Fall 2012 (Nightboat Books/A Bolha Editora); his translation from the Portuguese of Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer will appear in Fall 2013 (Nighboat Books/A Bolha Editora).

Professor of English and Creative Writing, ED PAVLIĆ’S newest books are Let's Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books, 2015), Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009, Kwani? Trust, 2013) and Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (U Georgia P, 2008). Others works include Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon, 2001), Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minnesota Press, 2002), and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE/Sheep Meadow Press, 2006). Among his current projects are two book-length manuscripts concerning the life and work of James Baldwin: “‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: Black Music and James Baldwin’s Political Aesthetic,” and “No Time to Rest: James Baldwin’s Life in Letters to His Brother David.”