Mule & Pear Reading and Discussion with Poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

7:00pm – Griffin 3

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, writer, photographer, and painter. She is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books/2010) and The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press/2011). Her most recent collection, Mule & Pear, was published by New Issues Poetry & Prose in fall 2011. A Cave Canem Fellow, she received the MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware and the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the recipient of fellowships including Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, New York State Summer Writers Institute, Soul Mountain, and others. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including Callaloo, The New York Times, Crab Orchard Review, Mosaic, RATTLE, Puerto Del Sol, Brilliant Corners, Indiana Review, Lumina, Ecotone, The Acentos Review, PMS: poem memoir story, Saranac Review, Torch, The Drunken Boat, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Inkwell, Black Arts Quarterly, African American Review, Comstock Review, Hambone, and many others. She was recently featured in the first ever poetry issue of O: The Oprah Magazine. Currently, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.

Mule & Pear rethinks, revisions, and responds to canonical voices and storylines in 20th and 21st century black women’s literary works including Nella Larsen’s Passing, Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and many of Toni Morrison novels, as well as voices from lesser-known American texts like Valerie Martin’s historical novel Property, and contemporary African classics-in-process like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Griffiths orchestrates an intertextual and inter-generational dialog on the meanings and experiences of black womanhood.

Sponsored by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Lecture Committee, the Department of Africana Studies, the Multicultural Center, and the Department of English.