On October 21st the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will kick off a year of events reflecting LGBTQ+ lives and experiences with a conversation between Literary Critic, Poet, and Professor Stephanie Burt (English, Harvard University) and Dr. Jacob Lau (Women’s and Gender Studies, UNC at Chapel Hill). Burt will be reading from and discussing her poetry collection Advice from the Lights (2017), which “weaves together extraordinary sequences, including Stephanie poems about the poet’s imagined girlhood; poems on particular years of the poet’s early life, each with its own memories, desires, insecurities, and pop songs; and versions of poems by the Greek poet Callimachus, whose present-day incarnation worries (who doesn’t?) about mortality, the favor of the gods, and the career of Taylor Swift.”
Though attendees must register, the event is free and begins over Zoom at 7:30. For more information and to register: https://events.ackland.org/event/nea-big-read-keynote102120/
Free virtual book discussions about Advice from the Lights will take place after the event from October – December. Once registered participants will receive a free copy of Burt’s collection. For more information on discussion dates and details see the link below.
The series and event is part of the Ackland receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities Big Read Grant and has been organized in partnership with Chapel Hill Public Library and Carolina Public Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.