Events
EL SHARIEFF KIRKMAN
Thoughts of a Beautiful Mind
Jo Malin, author of
My Life at the Gym
at Shamrock Gym Riverside Drive
“Very often, my workouts are the best part of my day,” notes feminist writer Jo Malin. My Life at the Gym celebrates women’s experiences of exercise and the found spaces for this activity as places of community with other women. Neither elite athletes nor dancers, the contributors to this volume are well aware of the negative cultural messages about women’s bodies that may influence body work. Yet, like many women, they have found comfortable and healthful spaces that allow them to enjoy exercise and take care of the physical needs of their bodies. Through diverse essays, personal accounts, and poems, contributors portray everyday lives in which meaning comes from movement and from the companions they move with in a variety of activities from running, walking, swimming, and skiing to boxing, Morris dancing, and yoga, among others. A unique, positive, and largely unremarked view of exercise and its place in women’s lives, this book will resonate with and inspire many readers.
“My Life at the Gym brings together essays, poems, and personal narratives of women’s experiences in gyms, dance studios, and outdoors. This diverse collection points to an important part of women’s everyday experience—exercise and fitness—often ignored by feminists within a number of disciplines. These narratives, thus, will serve as an inspiration for further feminist interdisciplinary insights into women’s physical activity.” — Pirkko Markula, editor of Feminist Sport Studies: Sharing Experiences of Joy and Pain
Jo Malin is a Project Director and Grants Specialist in the School of Education and Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York. She is the author of The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth Century Women’s Autobiographies and the coeditor (with Victoria Boynton) of Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography and Herspace: Women, Writing, and Solitude.
AUTHOR/POET APPEARANCE
Angelo will be reading from his books The Ocean Rose and Forty-Four Poems in Search of A Long Black Dress
Angelo was born into a family of actors, poets, sculptors, painters and singers Within this context, the enchantment and romance of a world filled with sensory, sensuous and sensual poetry were present from sunrise to sunset. His insights into the flavor and spice of the human heart simmer with the delicate aroma of love both found and often lost. Join us for this very special and romantic event.
John McAuliffe
John McAuliffe's main interests are in poetry, creative writing, contemporary literature and Irish Studies, and he is interested in supervising research in any of these areas.
He published his first collection of poems, A Better Life (Gallery), in 2002, which received a major bursary from the Irish Arts Council / An Comhairle Ealaion and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Award. His second collection Next Door was published in June 2007, and he has also published poems in the TLS, Poetry Ireland Review, Metre, PN Review, Poetry London and Poetry Review.
John writes essays and reviews of contemporary poetry for journals and newspapers in Ireland and the UK, including reviews and short essays on W.B. Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Cesare Pavese, Conor O'Callaghan, David Harsent, Peter Sirr, Thomas McCarthy, Mark Doty, contemporary British poetry and Patrick Kavanagh. He has also published critical essays on post-colonial literatures, Victorian travel writing and twentieth-century Irish poetry and fiction.
He previously taught at a number of Irish universities and The Open University, as well as at creative writing workshops at UCD and Birkbeck College and residential courses including the Aran Islands Festival, the Cuirt Festival and the Arvon Foundation.
He was programme director of Ireland's biggest poetry festival Poetry Now at Dun Laoghaire until 2007, and is a contributing editor to the journal Metre. He is also a member of the Irish and Scottish Studies Research Group and co-ordinates and chairs the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the only award of its kind which awards 5000 euros to the best collection of poems published by an Irish poet each year.
In Honor of St. Patrick’s Day
And Parade Day in Binghamton
Saturday, March 6th at 4 PM
(after the parade)
Get a Taste Of Ireland with an homage to the late award-winning Irish-American author Frank McCourt. Marty Doorey will share some of his favorite passages from McCourt's trio of memoirs, Angela's Ashes, 'Tis and Teacher Man, leavened by a short passage from James Joyce's classic short story, "The Dead," and a poem that evokes the wee people -- The Faeries by William Allingham.
Join us at 4 p.m. on "Parade Day", Saturday, March 6, for a touch of memory, balarney and poetry to mark the Emerald Isle's Patron Saint.
