Book events

Khadijah Queen & Kathy Fagan: Readings and Onstage Conversation with Yona Harvey
7:30-9 p.m. Jan. 30, Heinz Memorial Chapel, part of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Khadijah Queen is the author of the poetry collections “Conduit,” “Black Peculiar,” “Fearful Beloved,” and “I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On.” She was the winner of the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers for her verse play Non-Sequitur, which was staged by the theater company the Relationship in 2015. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Kathy Fagan is the author of five books of poetry: “The Raft,” a National Poetry Series selection; “Moving & St Rage,” winner of the 1998 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry; “The Charm”; “Lip”; and, most recently, “Sycamore.” Fagan was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2017 and has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation, Frost Place, and Ohio Arts Council. As director of Ohio State University’s creative writing program and is poetry editor of the Ohio State University Press.

Queen and Fagan also will give two brief craft talks and take questions from 4 to 5 p.m. Jan. 30, at 501 Cathedral of Learning.

Book awards

“Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter,” by Caitlin Bruce, assistant professor of Communication, has been selected as the 2019 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation Award winner. The award recognizes an outstanding book, published in English, which exhibits excellence in addressing issues of urban communication. It is named in honor of the late social activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Bruce’s book, published by Temple University Press, argues that public art generates spaces for encounter as well as places and moments that can re-energize the sense of possibility in urban spaces.

New books

“Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre” (University of Iowa Press, 2019) by Michelle Granshaw, associate professor, Theatre Arts

A little over a century ago, the Irish in America were the targets of intense xenophobic anxiety. Much of that anxiety centered on their mobility, whether that was traveling across the ocean to the U.S., searching for employment in urban centers, mixing with other ethnic groups, or forming communities of their own. Granshaw argues that American variety theater, a precursor to vaudeville, was a crucial battleground for these anxieties, as it appealed to both the fears and the fantasies that accompanied the rapid economic and social changes of the Gilded Age.