News + Events

MIT Writers Series Fall 2009
Free and open to public
 

Thrity Umrigar – The Weight of Heaven
September 24,  7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120

Thrity Umrigar's recently published novel The Weight of Heaven focuses on a grieving American couple who take work in a village outside Bombay. The Boston Globe saw the "grindingly sad personal story of Frank and Ellie" as "a metaphor for the corruption of global business based on poverty and the explotation of natural resources."

Thomas Levenson – Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist
October 6, 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120

Tom Levenson, Director of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, will read from his latest book Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.  In this book, Levenson reveals the remarkable and true tale of Sir Isaac Newton as Warden of the Royal Mint.

Andrea Barrett – The Air We Breathe
October 15, 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120

Andrea Barrett is the author of six novels, most recently The Air We Breathe, and two collections of short fiction, Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award, and Servants of the Map, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Merlinda Bobis – “Hush, I know a Story You Don’t Know: The Small Story/the Big Politics.”
October 30, 2009 4:00PM, Room 4-231

Merlinda Bobis, University of Wollongong, Australia, will speak on her latest novel The Solemn Lantern Maker.

The death of a human story is as violent as the death of a human being. It is double-murder: people are killed in conflict, then their story is killed by the official narrative. The ‘killing of story’ is symbolic violence, commonplace and insidious. In this lecture, writer Merlinda Bobis will discuss the dangerous imbalance between the privileged master narrative and the small, human story. Charting the writing of her new novel, ‘The Solemn Lantern Maker’, she will attempt to answer these questions: How do we write the human tale into the large social and political structures? How do we re-instate it in the public’s consciousness? How do we render the invisible visible?

Poetry@MIT Series Fall 2009
Free and open to public

Pamela Alexander – Slow Fire
October 20, 7:00PM, MIT Room 6-120

Pamela Alexander's fourth collection of poems, Slow Fire, came out in 2007 from Ausable Press (now acquired by Copper Canyon).  Earlier books of hers won major awards, including selection by James Merrill for the Yale Younger Poet series and an Iowa Poetry Prize.  She is currently working in nonfiction as well as poetry.

John Koethe – Ninety-fifth Street
November 12, 7:00PM, MIT Room 32-141

Poet John Koethe's new book is Ninety-fifth Street.  Sally's Hair is his previous book and his North Point North: New & Selected Poems came out in 2003.

Purple Blurb Series Fall 2009
Free and open to public

Noah Wardrip-Fruin
September 14, 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press, 2009), co-creator of Screen (among other works of digital writing), and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Mary Flanagan
November 2, 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310

Mary Flanagan is author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009), creator of [giantJoystick], and author of [theHouse] (among other digitial writing works). She is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth.

D. Fox Harrell
November 16, 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310

D. Fox Harrell is the creator of the GRIOT system for computational narrative and author of several works in this system, including Loss, Undersea and The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs. He is assistant professor of digital media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Marina Bers
November 30, 6:00PM, MIT Room 14E-310

Marina Bers is author of Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2007) and creator of the system Zora. She is associate professor in the Department of Child Development and adjunct professor in the department of computer sciences at Tufts University.