It's only July but I'm thinking about the coming year. I'm excited about the coming year. I'm thinking about how to mount a roster of intellectual and cultural fare for you that is not only illuminating but entertaining as well. Annie and Adel are helping me do this. I hand-pick my assistants with names that begin with "A." My family is the same, Alana is my wife, Amber, my daughter, Amelia my grand-daughter. Something about those "A" women does it for me. But enough about me. What's going on for you?
I'm thinking poetry for you. Late September, the 29h actually, poetic royalty. Sally Van Doren will visit us and regale us with her delightful verse. Then on October 7th someone you have never seen perform before but whom you will never forget. Someone brilliant, different, on the cutting edge and powerful. Her name is Patricia Lockwood and she will bedazzle and enchant you as in 'Rape Joke.' The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke. The rape joke is that he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living. Not you!" Edward Hirsch will be our Gerta Vanderbilt Whitney Connor Writer-In-Residence for 2014-15, one of the most gifted poets and poetic scholars that this country has ever produced. And speaking of people gifted with words in our speaker's series how about Richard Lederer who will give the Jack Burstyn Memorial Lecture, and who probably knows more about the English language that anyone since H.L. Mencken. He is also riotously funny, has written a dozen masterful books on language including Anguished English, Crazy English, and The Miracle of Language, and was once designated Punster of the Year by the International Pun Foundation. As if this were not enough you will also be seeing iconic writers Barbara Goldsmith and Gay Talese in the Fall. . . and some other surprises I'm hesitant to announce just yet. And please don't forget our writing classes, the tried and true memoir and fiction classes, Murder You'll Write, as well as a new one about social media with Ms. Manhattan. Did I say the Fall sounded exciting? It sounds positively exhilarating. . . .
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