Writing for the Public Speaker Series

Speaker Series

Writing for the Public Speaker Series

Anecdotal evidence suggests that academics are more attuned than ever to the importance of reaching beyond the ivory tower and engaging with a wider public.

This semester, the Writing Center is hosting a two-part speaker series featuring trained academics who write for a wider public.

Each speaker will be interviewed by Briallen Hopper, who teaches the new Professional Development course at the GC, “Public Writing for Academics.” Briallen is Assistant professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of Hard to Love (Bloomsbury, 2019), a collection of essays about love and friendship. Her essays, reviews, op-eds, profiles, listicles, and sermons have appeared in AvidlyBeliefnetBlack Business NowThe Chronicle of Higher EducationColumbia JournalThe ConversationCrosscurrentsDocument JournalHuffPostKtBLos Angeles Review of BooksThe New InquiryThe New RepublicNewsweekNew York Magazine/The CutNot Coming to a Theater Near YouReligion & PoliticsSacred MattersThe Seattle StarThe StrangerTake Part, and Talking Points Memo. She is the editor of the online literary magazine KtB ​and an associate editor at the UK-based independent press And Other Stories.

Scott Poulson-Bryant (October 21, 4:30-5:30)

Scott Poulson-Bryant is Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. He is a cultural historian and critic with areas of specialization in African American popular culture and Performance Studies. His teaching and research focuses on Hollywood film, black popular music, 20th and 21st century U.S. drama, genre fiction, gender and sexuality studies, and creative nonfiction writing. His research has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Studies, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and he is currently finishing his monograph Everybody is a Star: Cultural Citizenships and the Glamour of Blackness in 1970s US Popular Culture.

He has also published articles in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice, and other publications, and he was one of the founding editors of VIBE Magazine. His public-facing books include HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday) and The VIPs: A Novel (Broadway/Random House).

To attend this Zoom event, you must first register here.

 

Sarah Blackwood (November 18, 4:30-5:30)

Sarah Blackwood is associate professor of English at Pace University in downtown Manhattan and author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Studies in U.S. Cultures Series, University of North Carolina Press, 2019). She is co-editor of the Avidly Reads short book series with NYU Press and wrote the Introduction for the Penguin Classics centennial edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, The Hairpin, and Los Angeles Review of Books as well as American Literature, the Henry James Review, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States.

To attend this Zoom event, you must first register here