Events

Date: March 21, 2024
Time: 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Location: College Common, Humanities Building
Cost: This event is free.

GU alumnae Laura Read is a poet and educator living in Spokane. She is the author of Dresses from the Old Country (forthcoming from BOA Editions, 2018); Instructions for my Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Dorianne Laux), and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). Her poems appear widely. Recipient of a Washington State Artists Trust Grant, a Florida Review Prize for Poetry, and the Crab Creek Review Prize for Poetry, Laura teaches and presents regularly at literary festivals and conferences throughout the Northwest, such as GetLit!, Write on the Sound, Litfuse, and the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Laura served as Poet Laureate of Spokane from 2015-2017 and teaches writing and literature at Spokane Falls Community College.

She will be joined by the student winners of the 2023-2024 Gurian Writing Awards. A reception will follow.

Sabrina Imbler is a writer and science journalist living in Brooklyn. Their first chapbook, Dyke (geology) was published by Black Lawrence Press, and they have received numerous fellowships and scholarships in the US, including from the Asian American Writers' Workshop and Tin House. They are the recipient of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists, and their essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Catapult, and Sierra, among other publications. Their latest publication is the essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, published by Little Brown and Company. They have always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in the collection profiles one such creature. Imbler discovers that some of the most radical models of family, community, and care can be found in the sea. Exploring themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age, How Far the Light Reaches is a book that invites us to envision wilder, grander, and more abundant possibilities for the way we live.

We thank our event co-sponsors: the English Department, the Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Department, the Biology Department, the Environmental Studies Department, and the Davenport Hotel.

Image Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Date: February 21, 2024
Time: 4:30-6:30 p.m.
Location: College Common, Humanities Building
Cost: This event is free.

This presentation by Noralis Rodriguez-Coss, PhD (Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies) will explore complicit denial, social discourses that carry underlying patriarchal values and create a form of psychological abuse. Using feminist theory and data collection, she will examine how discourses of complicit denial reproduce patriarchal gender norms and shape the conditions that lead to gender-based violence and feminicides. A reception follows. The event is free and open to the GU community and public.

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