Reed College

Using a series of writing and drawing prompts, participants will use their personal stories and/or family histories to create the foundation for a collaborative short anthology-style Risograph perzine (personal zine). Registration required (maximum 6-participants).

This workshop is hosted by Portland comics artist Yoko O.K., who is the recipient of a 2026 Ignatz Award for her family history zine Uncoiling: A Japanese American Family’s History.

A talk by Glynnis Fawkes.

How does a cartoonist go about adapting a work of history, specifically Eric H. Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed? In this talk Fawkes will describe the process of interpreting Cline’s text in comics, an exercise during which she repeatedly asked herself how she might tell this story visually. Through page compositions and dramatizations in which historical figures (such as Ramses III) speak, she imagined characters for whom we have no record offering commentary and opinions. To guide the narrative, she introduced two new young characters, Pel (of the Sea Peoples) and Shesha, (an Egyptian scribe) who ask the central question of the book: Why after three prosperous centuries did the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age suddenly come to an end?

Glynnis Fawkes is the co-author with Eric H Cline and illustrator of 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press). She is also the author-illustrator of Charlotte Brontë before Jane Eyre (Little, Brown)and Persephone’s Garden (Secret Acres), among other books, and her comics have appeared on the website of The New Yorker. She has worked as an archaeological illustrator around the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean and teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.

Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and Reed's department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Free and open to the public.

When Toni Morrison declares that she “can't wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work,” she raises an issue at the heart of modern democratic life: What does freedom mean in the shadow of racial slavery and colonialism? While Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her contributions as a “revolutionary political thinker” remain underappreciated. Lawrie Balfour approaches Morrison’s political thought through her account of “word-work,” or the creative use of language, as a practice of freedom. First, Balfour considers Morrison’s defense of the necessity of writers to the flourishing of democracy and her reflections on the political implications of her own literary practice. Second, Balfour examines Morrison’s use of the language of “sovereignty” to convey what writers do, when they create worlds out of words. Third, she asks what Morrison might say about the part her novel Beloved played in the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia and concludes with some thoughts about the political urgency of Morrison’s word-work today.

Lawrie Balfour is James Hart Professor of Politics and a member of the American Studies faculty at the University of Virginia, where she offers courses on race, gender, democracy, and literature. She is the author of Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom; Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois; and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Lawrie’s current projects include a series of essays on reparations for slavery and a study of the Black feminist visions of the journal Freedomways (1961-1985).

Free and open to the public.

Author of It Starts With Anger James Spooner will be visiting campus on Nov 9th as our special author visit for Fall's MRC Book Club gathering. Spooner will be giving a talk on the intersections of punk, race and creative art practice, with time for Q&A.

Reed Librarians picked this coming-of-age graphic memoir that explores race, identity, and rebellion because of how Spooner traces how their reactionary anger evolved into a creative force. Confronted with systemic racism, microaggressions, and Nazi extremism within punk spaces, Spooner follows the founding of the Afro-Punk movement all the way to their leaving of the space due to all the ways it fell short as a scene that was ironically both liberating and alienating for the Black people drawn to it.

Their zine-inspired work includes photos, illustrations, and cartoon panels with traditional narrative in a unique package that examines the tension between the conflation of underground culture and mainstream success.

All are welcome to this event. Open to the community. Free for all.

----

We encourage Reed students, staff and faculty to sign up for the MRC Book Club to score a copy of Spooner's autobio. Sign up for your free copy here.

The talk addresses the deep connection between the Jewish German-language poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) and his most prolific translator, the contemporary translingual American poet Pierre Joris (1946–2025). Taking Joris's recent and final translated volume of Celan's poetry—Memory Rose into Threshold Speech (2020)—as its discursive perch, this talk constellates various key interlocutors between the two poets and examines Joris's tremendous half-century-long feat in translating the complete Celan into an American idiom. The force and lasting power of Joris's translation project lies in its rare ability to retain in English the mutilated music of Celan's umfarshtandlekh (incomprehensible) poetics, itself a form of German reimagined through a post-Holocaust expanded Yiddish.

Ariel Resnikoff is a poet, translator, editor and educator. Resnikoff’s recent works include Raisin in Every Bite (Furniture Press, 2022), A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021), and Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020), which was awarded an Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Prize. His newest poetry collection, Poems with Friends and Ghosts, is forthcoming from Chax Press in 2027. With Pierre Joris, he is also the co-editor of In Between, Keep Moving: A Pierre Joris Reader (Contra Mundum, 2026). Resnikoff translates Yiddish, Hebrew and Spanish poetry and prose. His own writing has been translated into German, French, Russian, and Mandarin, among other languages. In 2019, he received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2020 he was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. In 2025 he was a visiting writer and translator in China at Central China University in Wuhan and the University of Fudan in Shanghai. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the Co-Director of Litmus Press and Ether Sea Projects.

Sponsored by the departments of Russian and German and the Division of Literature & Languages. Free and open to the public.

Lisa Wells is an essayist and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is the author, most recently, of Delinquents (FSG, 2027), an essay collection about wage work, poetry, death, motherhood, and other subjects. Her book The Fire Passage (2025) won the Levis Poetry Prize, and her book Believers (2021) was a finalist for the PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her essays have been published by Granta, The Believer, n+1, The New York Times, and Harper’s Magazine, and have been included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food and Travel Writing.

Free and open to the public.

You are warmly invited to join us at the annual Senior Thesis Poster Session hosted by the Psychology Department.

Friday, April 16th from 4:15-5:45 PM
Located in the halls of the Psychology Building

Please join us for snacks, refreshments, and engaging conversation with our senior thesis students about their findings!