Written Arts Program and Human Rights Program Present

"The Devil and the Dictionary": A Lecture by Divya Victor

"The Devil and the Dictionary" is a lecture that offers a history of reading and a diasporic story of how a vocabulary travels through the bellies of empire(s). It is about fear, disgust, and curiosity. And blackberries. The lecture centers on the reading and writing practices of Malcolm X and Sylvia Plath, who Victor reads from various vantage points—as a child growing up in postcolonial India, as a new immigrant in the US in the aftermath of 9/11, and in the present, where she lives few miles from Malcolm X's childhood home in Michigan. Grounded in her research and memoiristic explorations from her upcoming book Kin: Essays on Reckless Devotion,  "The Devil and the Dictionary" is concerned with whiteness as a product of the American canon, and aims to imagine the complicated inheritances of immigrant poets of color in the United States.

Divya Victor is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Curb, which won the PEN Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award for Kin, her forthcoming collection of essays from Graywolf. She is also the author of Kith, Natural Subjects, Things to Do with your Mouth, and other books. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the director of the creative writing program. She has been a citizen of India, Singapore, and the United States, and is at home in all these countries.

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For more information, call 845-758-7383, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Campus Center North, Robert Kelly Multipurpose Room

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