St. Johnsbury First Wednesdays

UVM Professor Luis Vivanco explores the fascinating early history of the bicycle in Vermont, an invention that generated widespread curiosity when it arrived in the 1880’s - helping spark important changes in industrial production, consumerism, road policies, gender relations, and cultural ideas. (Registration required.) Read More »

Historian Damian Costello explores the life of the man behind the famous book Black Elk Speaks. Nicholas Black Elk’s Lakota philosophy can help us see the natural world as a unified whole, and his continued hope amidst great tragedy can inform how we approach contemporary crises. (Registration required.) Read More »

Gabriel García Márquez established the aesthetics of Magical Realism through his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which reintroduced Latin America to the rest of the world. Author Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, describes how Márquez became a spokesperson for a continent besieged by inequality, corruption, and dictatorship. Read More »

Beginning with Vermonter Lucy Terry Prince, the first known African American poet in the U.S., poet Shanta Lee Gander explores creative lineage within poetics. Surveying the work of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Rita Dove, and slam poet Dominique Christina, Gander considers the poetic arc from the past to the modern moment. (Registration required.) Read More »

Acclaimed Vermont poet Ruth Stone transformed her intense grief into poetry, using simple yet startling language. Nora Jacobson’s film “Vast Library of the Female Mind” provides an intimate look into Stone’s life and family. This screening will include panel discussion with Jacobson, former Vermont Poet Laureate Chard DeNiord, and a member of Ruth’s family. Read More »

Walt Whitman was a great poetic innovator, the poet who best sums up what it is to be an American, and his Song of Myself is the most majestic poem written in our nation. And yet, for all this, UVM professor emeritus Huck Gutman finds Whitman to be wonderfully approachable. Read More »

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a feminist superhero who could still do a plank at 87 and who survived pancreatic cancer long beyond expectations. Dartmouth history professor Annelise Orleck examines the life of the brilliant jurist who remained fiercely progressive, unapologetically liberal, and committed to equality to the end, and who loved her status as a pop culture idol. Read More »