Threshold Literary Award Winners and Childe Harold Conference at DePaul

Ex LibrisEvents
This morning, DePaul’s literary journal Threshold announced the winners of the 2012 Threshold Literary Award for Excellence, and we are pleased to say that two of the winners are our own English graduate students. Congratulations to Angel Woods who will be receiving the Nonfiction Award for her piece, “A Lesson About Detours” and Zhanna Vaynberg who will be receiving the Dramatic Literature Award for her play for “What It’s Never About”. Both are students in the MAWP.  The fiction and poetry awards this year go to two undergraduate students: Alec Moran for “Table Manners”and Emsie Bartsch for “Gretel”. Congratulations to all!
Threshold’s launch party for this year’s issue is set for Friday, May 25th from 3-6pm at the DePaul Art Museum. All are invited to attend to support the judges, contest winners, and everyone who submitted their work– and of course to receive free copies of the published journal!

Threshold is also hosting a reading from the contest judges on Thursday, May 10th at 6pm at the Richardson Library on DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus. Three of the four judges will be reading their own work: Eileen Favorite, Kimberly Dixon, and Victor Giron.

More information about these events is forthcoming. Check back soon!

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On Monday, April 30th, DePaul University will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the poem that made Lord Byron famous, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. Begun at Lawrence’s hotel in Lisbon, Portugal and published in the spring of 1812 in London, the poem charts the 24-year-old poet’s response to war-torn Europe, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and Portugal, Britain’s response, the Convention of Cintra, and the struggle of Greece to live up to its heroic past. The poem helped launch what we now refer to as the “Byronic hero” and influenced paintings by Turner and music by Berlioz, as well as numerous British, Russian, and French writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Lamartine.

In celebration, DePaul is hosting a day-long conference sponsored by the DePaul Humanities Center, the University Honors Program, and the Department of English. The conference will take place from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. at the Cortelyou Commons (2324 N. Fremont Street) on DePaul’s Lincoln Park Campus.

There will be two keynote addresses: Peter W. Graham (Virginia Tech), author of Don Juan and Regency England, winner of the Elma Dangerfield prize in Byron Studies, will speak on the Byronic hero in Childe Harold and the character of Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Christine Kenyon Jones (King’s College, London) will address Byron’s treatment of animals in Cantos I and II, drawing on her book Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing.

The conference also features a presentation by one of our own graduate students: MAWP student Jennifer Finstrom will address the topic of James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence and its influence on Byron’s poem at 12:20 p.m. Congratulations Jennifer, and best of luck presenting!

All are welcome to attend this conference. For complete details, click on the flyer for a full-sized version, and download the conference agenda here.