Lorna Goodison and Amy E. Elkins: On Craft, Poetry, Painting, and Jacob Lawrence

BMCM+AC presented a lecture, poetry reading, and conversation with Lorna Goodison and Amy E. Elkins. Elkins, Associate Professor of English at Macalester College, shared her research on craft and 20th century literature, introducing the interplay between poetry and painting in Goodison’s writing. Goodison, Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan and poet laureate of Jamaica from 2017-2020, reflected on her training at the Art Students League with painter Jacob Lawrence.

Lorna Goodison has published twelve internationally acclaimed collections of poetry and served as Jamaica’s poet laureate from 2017-2020. She also trained as a painter at the Jamaica School of Art and at the Art Students League in New York, taking classes with Black Mountain faculty member Jacob Lawrence. Goodison is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies, and has received the prestigious U.S. Windham-Campbell Prize, the Queen’s medal, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for her memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), among many other prizes and awards.

Amy E. Elkins is Associate Professor of English at Macalester College and a multimedia artist. She is the author of Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (Oxford University Press, 2022). In addition to interviewing writers for Los Angeles Review of Books and for podcasts such as Novel Dialogue, she has published collaborative creative-critical work in Post-45 Contemporaries and Modernism/modernity Print+, a film-essay in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and has published scholarly essays in such places as PMLA and Contemporary Literature.