Calendar

Mar
9
Mon
Elizabeth Goodenough: Growing Up Near the Great Lakes @ Hatcher Graduate Library, Special Collections, 6th floor
Mar 9 @ 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Dr. Elizabeth Goodenough explores the landscapes of the Great Lakes as they shape the lives of children, writers, and illustrators. She offers images and tales of lighthouses and shipwrecks from the inland seas, a biosphere with the power to influence artists forever. Stories of displaced children, indigenous youth, and runaways portray stormy passages. What geography constitutes “home” in picture books, Y/A and graphic novels, legends, and film?  How do we retain and preserve the settings we first encountered? Goodenough investigates how a sense of belonging and becoming abides within, sustaining or haunting a lifetime. In this session we recall regional memories, ideas about nature, and narratives of outdoor exploration. Registration is encouraged but not required.

Goodenough has taught literature at Harvard, Claremont McKenna, and Sarah Lawrence colleges, and the University of Michigan. She has published several volumes in Childhood Studies, and her award-winning PBS documentary, Where Do the Children Play?, helped initiate a national dialogue on outdoor play.

Immediately following the presentation, we invite you to this month’s Special Collections After Hours Event, The Great Lakes in Children’s Literature.

Special Collections After Hours: The Great Lakes in Children’s Literature @ Hatcher Graduate Library, Special Collections, 6th floor
Mar 9 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Look at the Great Lakes region through the eyes of Michigan children’s authors, including Tom Pohrt, Nancy Willard, and Joan Blos. In addition to published works, we will also have selected archival materials and artwork on display.

The Great Lakes represent the largest body of freshwater in the world and are surrounded by diverse ecosystems and communities, from the rust belt steel mills that sit on Indiana’s sand dunes to the protected forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Nonetheless, from Western New York to Eastern Minnesota, to grow up in the Great Lakes region means to grow up anchored to a landscape shaped by water, and to a social and economic environment built on a history of using (and often abusing) this abundant water source.

This event follows a lecture by Elizabeth Goodenough at 3:00pm, Growing Up Near the Great Lakes. Please join us for both events!

This event is part of Special Collections After Hours, a monthly open house series sharing highlights from the many books, documents, and artifacts in the Special Collections Research Center. Each event is open to everyone and will offer a new group of themed materials for visitors to explore. Open houses are held on the second Tuesday of each month during the academic year. Light refreshments are provided.

Mar
11
Wed
Lacy M. Johnson @ Weill Hall, Betty Ford Classroom 1100
Mar 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Free and open to the public. Reception and book signing to follow. 

Join us for a reading by Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings and professor of creative nonfiction at Rice University. David Morse, Lecturer at the Ford School’s Writing Center, will moderate the conversation and Q&A.

From the speaker’s bio: 

Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of The Reckonings, which was named a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Criticism and one of the best books of 2018 by Boston Globe, Electric Literature, Autostraddle, Book Riot, and Refinery 29. She is also author of The Other Side. For its frank and fearless confrontation of the epidemic of violence against women, The Other Side was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; it was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer Selection for 2014, and was named one of the best books of 2014 by KirkusLibrary Journal, and the Houston Chronicle. She is also author of Trespasses: A Memoir, which has been anthologized in The Racial Imaginary and Literature: The Human Experience.

She worked as a cashier at WalMart, sold steaks door-to-door, and puppeteered with a traveling children’s museum before earning a PhD from University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she was both an Erhardt Fellow and Inprint Fondren Fellow. As a writer and artist, she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Houston Endowment, Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, Houston Arts Alliance, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission (may it rest in peace), the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Sentence, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.

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