News from the School of IAS

Category: Creative Writing and Poetics

Winners Announced in MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics and Essay Press Book Contest

Essay Press and the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Poetics are happy to announce the winners of their collaborative book contest: of color by Katherine Agard and The War Requiem by Kaia Solveig Preus! Both books will be published in the coming year, and the authors will be invited to read on campus at part of the From the Convergence Zone reading series. This year's ...

March 26, 2019

Amaranth Borsuk and Shannon Cram speak at “Earthly Impressions” symposium

IAS faculty members Amaranth Borsuk and Shannon Cram spoke last week at a symposium organized by faculty in UW's Textual Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Earthly Impressions considered points of contact between the history of the book and the environmental humanities. Borsuk spoke about "Destruction and Durability in Artists' Books," with particular attention to the holdings of the University of Washington's Special Collections. Cram discussed ...

March 11, 2019

Ted Hiebert and Jin-Kyu Jung: At the intersection of art and geography

As IAS faculty members, Ted Hiebert and Jin-Kyu Jung have been colleagues for a long time. But they seldom had occasion to talk until they found themselves commuting on the same bus. Those commuter conversations a few years ago led to a creative collaboration of researchers from two different fields. Recently, Jung and Hiebert received a UW Royalty Research Fund (RRF) Scholar award for nearly $39,000 for a research project called “Imagining the Details: Creative-Critical Engagement of Mapping and Imagining.”

March 7, 2019

Amaranth Borsuk interviewed on The Hedgehog & the Fox podcast

IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk is interviewed this month on George Miller's book podcast The Hedgehog & the Fox. The two sat down to discuss Borsuk's MIT Press volume The Book, which explores the ever-changing object we know as "the book" from its position as "object, content, idea, and interface." Miller himself has ...

February 28, 2019

Ted Hiebert translates 101 Words of Pataphysics

IAS faculty member Ted Hiebert has translated 101 Words of Pataphysics (authored by the Collège de 'Pataphysique), a book of keywords related to the "science of imaginary solutions" invented by French playwright Alfred Jarry. The translation is available in book form through Noxious Sector Press in Seattle, or ...

February 1, 2019

Amaranth Borsuk reviews Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of

IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk reviews Nguyen's first book of poems, Ghost Of, in Lana Turner 11. Combining lyric reflections and visual poetry in invented forms, Nguyen's book explores the after-effects of her brother's suicide, which was preceded by his careful excision of himself from family photos in her parents' home. The gaps left behind become frames or nets in which Nguyen's language is caught as she tries to reconstruct her missing sibling. Borsuk writes:

January 14, 2019

Amaranth Borsuk exhibits collaborative work at Pierogi Gallery in New York

Curated by Heather and Raphael Rubinstein, the show Under Erasure takes its title from Jacques Derrida's concept of sous rature, which posits that to put a word under erasure (sous rature) is "to signal the inadequacy of inherited language while also recognizing its inevitability." The exhibition includes work by artists and writers who draw upon and obscure sourced texts. According to the curators, "Many of the works included in the exhibition, by artists such as Jenny Holzer and Glenn Ligon, utilize erasure and redaction to emphasize the political ...

December 10, 2018

Ellen Donnelly exhibits Call Me Rabbit in Los Angeles

MFA alum Ellen Donnelly (’16) will exhibit Call Me Rabbit, an immersive video installation, at Actual Size in Los Angeles, CA from December 15 to January 19. The New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition uses imagery, audio, and rhetoric from wellness culture, online marketing, and social media to create an anxious but intriguing landscape to consider our place as individuals and the way we define ourselves as such.

December 7, 2018

Rebecca Brown publishes Not Heaven, Somewhere Else, a cycle of stories

IAS Senior Artist-in-Residence Rebecca Brown's new book of stories, Not Heaven, Somewhere Else, a cycle of stories was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in October. The book has been reviewed in The Seattle Review of Books and The Stranger. From The Seattle Review of Books: "Rebecca Brown is the smartest writer in Seattle. ..."

December 5, 2018

Travis Sharp publishes new artist’s book: one plus one is two ones

MFA alum Travis Sharp just published his artist’s book! one plus one is two ones (Recreational Resources, 2018) is a mass-produced handmade book about fake math and infinity, hand-written (in part an homage to Hanne Darboven's hand-written alternative mathematics conceptual art projects) & scanned & reproduced in an unlimited edition via CreateSpace. The work also includes many of Sharp’s drawings of hashtags and a procedural erasure of his Twitter feed via Fibonacci, patron saint of Twitter infinity.

December 5, 2018