Lindsay Turner, Walt Hunter, Willard Spiegelman, Gary Mann, Harriet Mann, Michael Mann. Friday, April 14th, 2023.

Gertrude Mann was an alumna of Cleveland Heights High School, attended Miami University of Ohio, and earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in education at Case Western Reserve University (FSM ‘51, GRS ‘72). She was an inspiring teacher in many secular and Jewish venues, including the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. She developed and taught workshops on memoir writing throughout Cleveland and loved helping others “find their voices.” This lecture celebrates Gertrude’s legacy of student and community engagement, and it is generously supported by the Gertrude Mann Visiting Writers Fund.

The Gertrude Mann Memorial Lecture by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Friday, January 24th, 2025
Clark 206, 11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland OH  44106
3:15 to 4:30 p.m. (reception following)

Alum (’10) Iris Jamahl Dunkle will be reading from her book Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb and talking about her process of writing biography and poetry.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is a poet, biographer, and scholar whose work challenges the male-centric narratives of the American West’s recorded history and amplifies the often-overlooked voices of women. Her new book, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, October 15, 2024), is a USA Today bestseller, receiving national acclaim for its poignant exploration of Babb’s life and her fraught relationship with the literary history of the Dust Bowl. PBS producer Ken Burns describes the biography as “heartbreaking and heroic,” bestselling author Kristin Hannah calls it “long overdue,” and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass lauds Dunkle as a “brilliant and vivid storyteller.” The book has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Millions, The Los Angeles Times, Alta, and many more. An excerpt describing how “Steinbeck mined her research for The Grapes of Wrath. Then her own Dust Bowl novel was squashed” appeared in Salon and sparked dialogue about Babb’s unacknowledged contributions to literary history.

Dunkle earned her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. Dunkle curates Finding Lost Voices, a weekly blog dedicated to resurrecting the voices of women who have been marginalized or forgotten. She has garnered recognition through awards and fellowships from esteemed institutions such as Biographers International, Millay Arts, and Vermont Studio Center, and her writing has appeared in publications like Orion, Electric Lit, Liber, Pleiades, Tin House, Calyx, Fence, The Los Angeles Review, and Split Rock Review. Notably, her work was featured on The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and showcased on one hundred buses during the Muni Art 2020 campaign.

 

“Pattern Mapping a Life: The Convergence of Form and Fragmentary Memory”
The Gertrude Mann Lecture by Airea D. Matthews
Friday, March 22nd, 2024
Senior Classroom, Tinkham Veale University Center
3:15 to 4:30 p.m. Livestream at  www.case.edu/livestream/s2

“Whoever managed to survive must have the strength to remember.”
-Aleksandr Herzen, “Western European Arabesques I, The Dream,” My Past and Thoughts

Most of memory is an abbreviated echo of reality. Writers are left with fragmentary memories that must serve to illumine some truth of their lives or the truth of life itself. Form enters as a critical craft device in the proper delivery of memory’s disordered parcels. In this talk, based on the poems in Bread and Circus, we will explore the importance of form and pattern mapping in creating a cogent personal narrative from disparate intertextual sources and shared remembrances.

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. From 2022-2023 she served as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she directs the poetry program.

 

 

“Becoming a Poet: The Case of Amy Clampitt”
 A Lecture by Willard Spiegelman
Friday, April 14th, 2023
Clark 206
3:15 to 4:15 p.m.

Amy Clampitt (1920-1994) was born into a family of Quaker farmers in Iowa. She was graduated from Grinnell College, and made a bee-line for New York, where she lived in total obscurity for almost four decades before bursting onto the literary scene in 1978, when The New Yorker published her first poems. Alfred A. Knopf published five volumes of them between 1983 to 1994. She rose like a comet, winning accolades and attention, before dying of ovarian cancer while still at the height of her creative power. From childhood on she was always writing, but as a young woman in Manhattan, living in a Greenwich Village studio apartment, she had tried—and failed—to become a novelist, before turning to poetry, where her truest gifts lay. How she became a poet is a fascinating story of personal choice, hard work, good luck, and genius.

Willard Spiegelman taught for many years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he also served as editor-in-chief of The Southwest Review. A frequent contributor to the Arts & Leisure pages of the Wall Street Journal, he is the author of many books of literary criticism and personal essays, and the editor of Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt.