Natasha Trethewey

The prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock and others, has inducted two Hollins University creative writing program graduates into its ranks: U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey and 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Trethewey earned her master’s degree in creative writing at Hollins in 1991, and returned last spring to serve as the 2012 Louis D. Rubin writer-in-residence. In the summer the Library of Congress chose her as the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate. Her collection “Native Guard” won the 2007 Pulitzer for poetry.

Dillard is a member of the Hollins class of  ’67 and earned her M.A. in Creative Writing in ’68.

The two authors are in intriguing company. From the Academy press release:

In the Humanities and the Arts, new members include: novelist Martin Amis; novelist and essayist Wendell Berry; philosopher David Chalmers; director and actor Robert De Niro; Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Annie Dillard and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey; actor Sally Field; Michael Fishbane, a scholar of Jewish studies; operatic soprano Renée Fleming; jazz musician Herbie Hancock; documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles; French history scholar Sarah Maza; linguist David Perlmutter; artist Judy Pfaff; Stuart Schwartz, a leading historian of colonial slavery; artist Yoshiaki Shimizu; and singer-songwriters Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen.

Last year’s octopus float will be a giant sugar skull this year in the Roanoke Marginal Arts Festival Parade, which starts at noon on Saturday, March 30 at Community High School in downtown Roanoke. Anyone is welcome to join in.

MIKE ALLEN | The Roanoke Times. Marginal Arts Festival founder Brian Counihan demonstrates one of the Easter Egg masks he’s making for the festival parade on March 30.

The Roanoke Marginal Arts Festival decided not to take chances this year.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be odd, bizarre, cutting-edge art experiences mixed into the festivities. It’s the weather they don’t want to gamble on.

For the past four years, the festival has tied its schedule to Mardi Gras, which meant it sometimes has taken place in the heart of winter. Founder Brian Counihan counts his blessings that the colorful and strange Marginal Arts Parade through downtown Roanoke has never been snowed out.

“We dodged a bullet every year,” said Roanoke artist Ralph Eaton, another of the festival’s organizers. So the artists running the festival decided to move it back a few weeks. (Eaton joked that he wished it could be held April Fool’s Day.)

The lineup this year includes an appearance from the Society for Creative Anachronism, famous for wearing medieval garb and battling with rattan swords, a contest to write a novel in 48 hours, experimental poetry, experimental art, experimental theater, and workshops that might help you understand what all these experiments are getting at. “We have a lot of professional artists involved,” Counihan said.

Of course there’s the parade at noon March 30 and the absurdist street carnival that immediately follows. This year, the festival ends with Vaudeville Night, a performance at the June M. McBroom Theater in Community High School at 302 Campbell Ave. S.E. Themes for the festival include Easter eggs, the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, and lucha libre, the sport of Mexican professional wrestling.

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Festival organizers could use help decorating this giant clown shoe. Click the image to go to the Marginal Arts Festival page on Facebook.

Courtesy Patrick Kennerly. The cast of Showtimers’ “A Lesson Before Dying” (l-r): : James Wise, Jr. (Grant), Tim Kennard (Deputy Paul), William Penn (Rev. Ambrose), Barbara Sanders (Emma Glenn), and Mike Johnson (Jefferson).

Thousands in the Roanoke Valley, many of them schoolchildren, read Ernest J. Gaines’ tragic novel of racism and injustice, “A Lesson Before Dying,” in early 2010 as part of The Big Read, a community reading effort led by Roanoke Valley Reads.

Starting Wednesday, Showtimers Community Theatre will bring the novel to life on stage in honor of Black History Month — the first time the 62-year-old theater has put on a play for the observance, said show director Patrick Kennerly.

The play is one of several Black History Month events happening this month in Roanoke and at Virginia Tech.

Kennerly took part in a reading of the theater adaptation of “A Lesson Before Dying” at Studio Roanoke during The Big Read. “I just fell in love with the play. You can’t really watch that play without being affected by it,” he said.

So last summer Kennerly — a veteran of many past Showtimers’ productions — suggested the play to the Showtimers board. It will be the theater’s season’s opener for 2013.

Adapted by Romulus Linney, the play closely follows Gaines’ story of a poor black man falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to die, and rival mentors — a minister and a schoolteacher — who influence how he will live out his remaining days.

Burton Center for Arts and Technology engineering teacher Mike Johnson plays the condemned man, Jefferson; Roanoke jazz musician William Penn portrays the Rev. Moses Ambrose; and James Wise Jr. has the lead role as Grant Wiggins, a teacher in a segregated school for black students.

“This is the first play I’ve done that’s been a major drama,” Penn said. “I love the story. All the characters have a lot to say.”

More than 70 families in the Roanoke Valley have adopted Chinese children, according to Pearl Fu, founder and director of Local Colors of Roanoke.

These families have longed for someone who could teach their adopted children the language, music and dance of their home country. Fu found an unlikely teacher – a 13-year-old student at North Cross School.

Liu Yang has been instructing her young pupils in Chinese folk dances. Though she’s young herself, she has nine years of dance experience already. She’s been meeting with the children and their parents on weekends to teach them for free, Fu said.

On Saturday at the Taubman Museum of Art, Liu, who performs under the name Lulu, will dance with about 10 of her students as part of the 2013 Chinese New Year celebration.

Technically, it’s the Year of the Snake, but Fu doesn’t like snakes. She joked that she’s calling it the year of the “little dragon” instead.

The free event is intended to bring more people through the museum’s doors. “We’re doing the whole thing for them,” Fu said. “It’s such a wonderful facility.”

Liu will also perform a Mongolian dance. Fu called her “very mature for her age.”

The program also features a piano performance of a Chinese folk song by Annie Chen, a student from China attending Roanoke Catholic School. She’s played piano for 13 years, starting when she was 4.

Fu said that it can be difficult to find Chinese classical musicians familiar with their native music, as many are trained to learn Western compositions.

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I’m honored to have been granted permission by Virginia Tech and poet Nikki Giovanni to reprint her poem, “The Self-Evident Poem,” as a special bonus to accompany today’s story about the upcoming concert by the Diane Monroe Quartet, performed in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. At the concert, which takes place Friday, Jan. 25 at The Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, jazz violinist Monroe will debut a new song that uses the words of Giovanni’s poem.

The text of the poem follows below.

Nikki Giovanni’s “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea,” where “The Self-Evident Poem” first appeared.

Diane Monroe has adapted “The Self-Evident Poem” as a song.

The Self-Evident Poem

by Nikki Giovanni

It was never theirs to begin with . . . they came and took it and now it is taken back . . .that much anyone can see . . . it’s self-evident . . . no further explanation needed . . .

This poem is self-evident too . . . this poem needs no further explanation . . . this poem stands on its own as its own for its own sake . . . this poem is happy . . .

Sometimes this poem feels lonely . . . Sometimes this poem yearns for a poem to talk with and laugh with and maybe have a glass of wine with in some nice little neighborhood corner café where everybody knows your name

And sometimes this poem just wants to take a book and go to central park and read

It’s self-evident that life is about the good we do not the evil that is left behind and there is so much evil in the world sitting in so many high places telling so many lies while choking the life out of the vulnerable and the helpless and you’ve just got to love black folks for being able to bury the lynched and the burned for being able to bear the lash and lies for finding a song to lift our spirits and send our souls to a better place

And you’ve just got to feel sorry for white folks who still do not understand this is another century and we just can’t keep bombing the same people over and over again because we don’t want to admit the craziness is home grown

So this poem prays for peace and hopes it can find another poem to peddle for peace and they find a poem which walks for peace and they find a poem which flies for peace and maybe they will all get together and raise a song that drowns the war cries the capital punishment cries and sad cries of lost people looking for an empire that was never theirs to begin with

Nikki Giovanni, from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, used by permission of author, ©2002.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison

The Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech has announced a 2012-13 season that includes Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and internationally acclaimed poet Maya Angelou, virtuoso classical pianist Jeremy Denk and a petting zoo filled with dinosaurs – all despite not actually having a completed building.

The $94 million project isn’t scheduled to be complete until September 2013, but for the second year the fledgling institute has assembled a season in collaboration with the university and several other arts venues, including a number of classical music events that will be part of the Lyric Theatre’s “Live at the Lyric” performance lineup.

Ben Knapp, director of the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, which will be housed within the center, said enough of the structure of the building has been framed that visitors can see what it will look like. At present, construction is ahead of schedule, he said.

The staff for the center and the institute, known as ICAT, is currently housed in different buildings on and off campus, but the plan is to get programs up and running before the building is ready.

ICAT’s programs research how creativity works and how art can be integrated into data analysis, education programs and other disciplines. Knapp described using virtual reality technology to allow people to walk inside an architectural simulation of a building as it’s being designed, or explore genome data in 3-D.

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NOTE: The schedule for the Hollins Theatre performance at the Kennedy Center changed. The new time is 1 p.m. Sept. 3. I’ve changed this post to reflect that. —MikeA

From my Inbox to you:

HOLLINS THEATRE TAKES NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S BELLOCQ’S OPHELIA TO THE KENNEDY CENTER

The Hollins Theatre has been invited to present a concert reading of its acclaimed production of Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia at the 11th annual Page to Stage Festival of New Play Readings, which will be held September 1 – 3 at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The festival showcases the works in progress of professional theatre companies from throughout the Washington, D.C., region. Admission to festival events is free, no tickets are required, and limited seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Bellocq’s Ophelia is based on the book of poetry by Trethewey, a 1991 graduate of Hollins’ master of arts program in English and creative writing, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and newly appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. The performance, which takes place Monday, September 3 (Labor Day) starting at 1 p.m. on The Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, will be a partially staged reading with music, samples of the original choreography, and audio-visual projections reflecting the elaborate theatrical imagery of the original production, which features 25 of Trethewey’s poems.

Bellocq’s Ophelia follows the journey of a young biracial woman in 1911 who leaves the cotton fields of her home in southern Mississippi to pursue her dream in the cosmopolitan center of New Orleans. Confronted by the roadblocks of racial and gender discrimination, her only opportunity for survival is found in an octoroon brothel, where “women with white skin offer the promise of the wild African continent.” She meets photographer Ernest Bellocq, first becoming his model, later his muse, then finally his apprentice. Through the artistic lens of a camera, and with the unique perspective of a woman who is both African American and white, Ophelia begins to see the world more clearly as she steps out of the picture frame and into her life.

Adapted by Associate Professor of Theatre Ernest Zulia, Associate Professor of English T.J. Anderson III, and Lexi Martin Mondot ’12, Bellocq’s Ophelia premiered at the Hollins Theatre in February 2012 during the highly successful Legacy Series, “Five Stars and a Moon,” which featured the works of six of Hollins’ acclaimed alumnae authors, including Annie Dillard, Lee Smith, and Margaret Wise Brown.

This just in from the Associated Press concerning Natasha Trethewey, a Hollins alumna whose father, Eric Trethewey, is on the Hollins faculty. (See my story about Trethewey’s appointment to Poet Laureate here.)

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is working on a memoir, currently untitled, that has been acquired by Ecco. The publisher, an imprint of HarperCollins, announced Monday that the book is scheduled to come out in 2014.

The 46-year-old Trethewey is the daughter of a white father and black mother. The memoir will tell of her childhood in the American South in the 1970s and `80s.

Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for her collection “Native Guard.” This fall, she begins a one-year term as U.S. poet laureate.

UPDATE 6/8/12: Read my interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and her father, Hollins University English professor Eric Trethewey.

Natasha Trethewey, the 2012 Hollins University writer-in-residence, daughter of English professor Eric Trethewey and a 1991 graduate of the Hollins Master’s in Creative Writing program, has been named the U.S. Poet Laureate. This past February the Hollins Theater Department performed an original play, “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” adapted from her poetry collection of the same name.

Here’s more from the Associate Press:

Associated Press | File 2007. Pulitzer winner and Hollins alumna Natasha Trethewey will be named the Library of Congress' 19th poet laureate today.

WASHINGTON — A Pulitzer Prize winner is the nation’s first poet laureate to hail from the South since the initial one — Robert Penn Warren — was named by the Library of Congress in 1986.

Natasha Trethewey, 46, an English and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta and Hollins University’s Louis D. Rubin Writer-in-Residence for 2012, will be named the 19th poet laureate today. She is also Mississippi’s top poet and will be the first person to serve simultaneously as a state and U.S. laureate.

Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry book, “Native Guard.” They focused partly on history that was erased because it was never recorded. She wrote of the Louisiana Native Guard, a black Civil War regiment assigned to guard white Confederate soldiers held on Ship Island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

The Confederate prisoners were later memorialized on the island, but not the black Union soldiers.

A stanza reads:
“Some names shall deck the page of history
“as it is written on stone. Some will not.”

Librarian of Congress James Billington, who chose Trethewey after hearing her read at the National Book Festival in Washington, said her work explores forgotten history and the many human tragedies of the Civil War.

“She’s taking us into history that was never written,” he told The Associated Press. “She takes the greatest human tragedy in American history – the Civil War, 650,000 people killed, the most destructive war of human life for a century – and she takes us inside without preaching.”

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