Calendar of Events
Humanities for Everyone
February 2022
*DIGITAL* Lucy Terry Prince: Witness, Voice, and Poetics within the American Tradition
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 »
March 2022
“Vast Library of the Female Mind:” the Life and Poetry of Ruth Stone
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 »
April 2022
Walt Whitman: American Poet
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 »
May 2022
The Legacy of “The Notorious RGB”
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 »