Reed College

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...