Event information:
Celebrating 60 Years of the UMass English MFA for Poets & Writers
Presenting:
Visiting Writers Series no. 2 // Fall 2023
DOROTHEA LASKY
Join us for the second installment of the Visiting Writers Series (VWS) with UMass MFA alum, DOROTHEA LASKY.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of six full-length collections of poetry including The Shining, Milk, Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books, as well as Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton). She is also the author of the essay collection, Animal (Wave Books). She has written several chapbooks, including: Snakes (Tungsten Press), Matter: A Picturebook (Argos Books), and Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse), among others. She is the editor of Essays (Essay Press) and the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's).
She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Born in St. Louis, she is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and director of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program. She lives in New York City.
About Dorothea Lasky's newest work, THE SHINING:
As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s text or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point us to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.