The Fall 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series continues with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by poet & critic Sandeep Parmar followed by a conversation with poet Valzhyna Mort.

Sandeep Parmar is the author of Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman (a critical study of the modernist writer Mina Loy’s literary archive), scholarly editions of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees and the Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard, and three books of poetry, The Marble Orchard and Eidolon (a rewriting of the myth of Helen of Troy in modern America) and Faust (an extended response to Goethe's play). Her research interests are primarily British and American women’s writing of the early twentieth century, modernism, as well as race and contemporary poetry in English. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker and Co-Director of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing. In 2017, she co-founded the Ledbury Poetry Critics program for poetry critics of colour. Parmar is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts and the 2022-2023 Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer.

Valzhyna Mort is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG 2020), named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times, and the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Her work has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Mort translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems Air Raid (Ugly Duckling 2021). 

Books by Sandeep Parmar will be available for purchase.

Book signing to follow.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Currently on Cornell's campus, masking is encouraged but not required.

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The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.

This event is presented by the Department of Literatures in English / Creative Writing Program at Cornell University