PRESS RELEASE: Lorna Goodison and Amy E. Elkins in Conversation

Lorna Goodison and Amy E. Elkins in Conversation
Thursday, July 20th, 2023 at 7PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Free to attend

Join us for a lecture, poetry reading, and conversation with Lorna Goodison and Amy E. Elkins. Elkins will share her research on craft and 20th century literature, introducing the interplay between poetry and painting in Goodison’s writing. Goodison will reflect on her training at the Art Students League with Jacob Lawrence who began his teaching career in 1946 at Black Mountain College.

Lorna Goodison

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

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.

“Besides, I had dreams of becoming a great painter, and after spending a year at the Jamaica School of Art I decided that I wanted to be trained according to the old system; I wanted to paint with a ‘master,’ and at the Art Students League there were masters like the brilliant African American painter Jacob Lawrence. So I came to New York in the hope of working with him; and after painting for one term with portrait painter Robert Brachman, I was fortunate enough to get a place in Jacob Lawrence’s class in the winter of 1969. I credit my time in New York City for force-feeding my senses, its extraordinary sights and sounds overtaking me on a regular basis and producing that spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that William Wordsworth called poetry.”

-from From Harvey River, Lorna Goodison