Sue Hart Memorial Reading and Lecture Series

Reading, February 12, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Danell Jones is a writer and scholar with a PhD in literature from Columbia University. She is the author of The Virginia Woolf Writers Workshop; the poetry collection Desert Elegy; and An African in Imperial London (also available from Hurst Publishers), which won the High Plains Book Award for Nonfiction.

Danell Jones most recent book, The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax, a recent best-seller in England, examines a moment when Virginia Woolf and her companions fooled the British Navy by masquerading as African royalty. Gretchen Gerzina, author of Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History, says this about the book: “Deeply researched and marvelously written, this is the book about Bloomsbury and the Dreadnought Hoax that we’ve been waiting for. Jones gives an essential racial and historical context for the event and its aftermath, which continues to this day.”

Reading, April 16, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Jodi Varon is the author of two memoirs in linked essays, most recently Your Eyes Will Be My Window, published in September of 2023 by the University of Georgia Press imprint Crux: The Georgia Series of Literary Nonfiction and also Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father, a WILLA Award finalist from Women Writing the West. A translator of the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Li He, Varon's book of Li He's poems is The Rock's Cold Breath: Selected Poems of Li He. She is a professor emeritus of English at Eastern Oregon University, a founding editor of basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts and currently a faculty affiliate at the University of Montana. She lives near Missoula where she raises native plants and vegetables for her family, pollinators, and the local food bank.

Poetry Reading, April 23, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Please join us in support of local high school students from the Billings Career Center as they share their lives and expressions through poetry. After months of writing and workshopping with guest poets in the community, funded through Humanities for Montana, the students are excited to share their work. The poets are a combined mix of Jessica Gaudreau’s freshman students and Deni Oltrogge’s senior students who have been working with the theme:  Reflections: Beginnings and Endings.  A special thanks to poets Dave Caserio, Tami Haaland, Melissa Kwasny, Wanda Morales, and Doug Oltrogge for taking the time to share their poetry and help Billings students.

For more information contact: Tami Haaland, Montana State University Billings, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences at 406-657-2948 or email thaaland@msubillings.edu.

See also:

MSU Billings announces opening selection for the Spring Sue Hart Memorial Reading and Lecture Series