Alumni Weekend
May 16, 2009: Nick Spitzer's "American Routes: Songs and Stories from the Road"
Folklorist Nick Spitzer is professor of communication and American studies at Tulane University where he began as a Mellon Humanities Fellow in 2004. Nick is also the producer and host of the radio program Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to the State (1985), and The Mississippi Delta Ethnographic Overview (1979) for the National Park Service. He helped create the Folklife Pavilion at the 1984 World's Fair, where he curated The Creole State: An Exhibition of Louisiana Folklife (1984-2004). He served as senior folklife specialist at the Smithsonian (1985-1990) and artistic director for the Folk Masters concert/broadcasts from Carnegie Hall and Wolf Trap (1990-1997) and the Independence Day concerts broadcast from the National Mall (1992-2001).
Nick has been a commentator/producer for NPR's All Things Considered and Fresh Air, PBS's Great Performances, CBS' Sunday Morning, and ABC's Nightline, and Evening News with Peter Jennings. Spitzer directed the film Zydeco: Creole Music and Culture in Rural Louisiana (1986), and has produced or annotated two dozen documentary recordings. In 2002 Nick co-curated 'Raised to the Trade': Creole Building Arts of New Orleans at New Orleans Museum of Art. He is co-editor of the book Public Folklore (1992, 2007) and co-author of Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (2006, Penn Press). A former resident scholar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe and a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, Spitzer received the Benjamin Botkin Award in Public Folklore, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Excellence in Broadcasting Award for American Routes, and was named Louisiana Humanist of the Year in 2006 for cultural recovery efforts after the catastrophe. His interests include Gulf Coast ethnography, cultural creolization, American vernacular music/culture, and public cultural policy. Nick was a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow working on traditional creativity in Louisiana Creole communities.
May 17, 2008: A poetry reading featuring former students of Professor Dan Hoffman
For many years the Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Penn before his retirement, Dan Hoffman taught literature courses in the English Department as well as one poetry workshop each year for students of exceptional ability. That one workshop, it turns out, was the foundation upon which Penn's Creative Writing Program was built. The success of Dan's work as a teacher is also evident in the many students who have developed fine careers as poets and teachers themselves.
Readings by Dan's former students — Christina Davis (C'93, G'93), Michael Jennings (C'71), Jay Rogoff (C '75), and J. Allyn Rosser (G'88, GR'91) — were followed by Dan's reading of selections from the work his late wife, the poet Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman.
May 12, 2007: A Celebration of Young Alumni Fiction Writers
Click above for a QuickTime video excerpt: Jessica Lowenthal introduces Courtney Zoffness and Courtney begins her reading
Michael Hyde ('95), whose stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and who recieved a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and a FundaciÛn ValparaÌso artist grant, read from his short story collection What Are You Afraid Of? which won the 2005 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. "Her Hollywood"
Courtney Zoffness ('00), who founded and ran the "Speakeasy" open mic series at the Kelly Writers House, has published nonfiction in Ladies' Home Journal, the Earth Times, and New York's daily Metro, among others, and fiction in publications such as Redivider, the Pedestal Magazine, Washington Square Review, and the Fish Prize Stories Anthology — an international contest. Zoffness works as a copyeditor at Rolling Stone magazine and as a ghostwriter. She's also at work on a novel of her own. She read an excerpt from her book Is It a Fish?
Laura Dave's writing has appeared in Self, Glamour, The New York Observer, and ESPN the Magazine. She is the recipient of a Henry Hoyns Fellowship, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, and an AWP Intro Award in Short Fiction. She read an excerpt from her first novel, London Is the Best City in America (Viking 2006), which is currently being developed as a major motion picture at Universal Studios.
A free, downloadable recording of the entire event is available here.
