Remembering Akilah Oliver
Akilah Oliver (1961-2011) was a prominent poet/performer in the avant-garde literary scene. Her first book of poetry was published by the feminist avant-garde press, Belladonna* Collaborative.
Oliver’s work is experiential, a scoring of ideas on the page. She wrote about identity (specifically race and gender), history and dailiness. Her friends appear in her work– community, friendship and collaboration were important to her. Her work is an extension of who she was, warm, capacious and nuanced. Her Belladonna* chapbook The Putterer’s Notebook privileged the “putterer” and the notational. Her chapbook gives a sense of her innovation (just even typographically) and the restlessness and movement in the text:
http://www.mazzastudio.com/images/design/PDFs/Oliver-Putterers-Notebook-singles.pdf
Nightboat books has just reprinted The she said dialogues, in which Oliver described the poems as a means to”investigate the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness (as both a personal identity and a non-essentialist historical notion), sexuality and language.” Read an excerpt below:
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/02/poetry/from-the-she-said-dialogues-flesh-memory
– By: Jennifer Firestone
2021 Akilah Oliver Award
This award commemorates Akilah Oliver, a poet, performer, activist, and Lang professor, whose courses challenged students not only to engage poetic texts but also the criticism and conversations that surround them. This award recognizes a student poet at Lang whose poetry has some of the features of Akilah’s writing and teaching.
Remembering Robin Mookerjee
Robin Mookerjee began teaching at Lang in 2000 as the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum (the First-Year Writing Program at the time) and went on to teach Fiction, Poetry, and Literature in Writing and Literary Studies, for which he also served terms as Chair and Advisor, until his death in May of 2016. A beloved and iconoclastic teacher, Robin had wide and varied intellectual and artistic interests: he was a poet, fiction writer, literary scholar, and musician who taught on a wealth of topics, including Anglo-American poetry, transgressive fiction (about which he wrote a book), experimental modernist writers, cyberpunk, and so on. Ever challenging (in his words), “the false certainties that would model knowledge and experience,” Robin was known among colleagues for his wry wit, sly humor, and devilish irony as well as his abiding punk-rock sensibility.
– By: Dr. James Fuerst
Robin Mookerjee Award
This award commemorates Robin Mookerjee, a scholar, creative writer, and Lang professor, whose creativity, humor, and passion for literature inspired students and colleagues alike. This award recognizes a Lang student whose creativity and passion for literature have some of the features of Robin’s writing and teaching.
October 10, 2019
Ann Snitow May 9, 1943-August 10, 2019 Ann Snitow, a founding faculty member of Lang College and the creator of the Gender Studies Program at the New School, passed away on August 10, 2019. She was a beloved member of the Literary Studies faculty. While indeed her books and essays are crucial texts in feminist studies and in the life of the mind, as Literary Studies colleagues our remembrances here are more personal, testaments not just to her work but to the power of her being.
June 2, 2017
Associate Professor of Literary Studies Paul Kottman’s latest book, Love As Human Freedom is available now! Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. […]
Remembering Akilah Oliver
Akilah Oliver (1961-2011) was a prominent poet/performer in the avant-garde literary scene. Her first book of poetry was published by the feminist avant-garde press, Belladonna* Collaborative.
Oliver’s work is experiential, a scoring of ideas on the page. She wrote about identity (specifically race and gender), history and dailiness. Her friends appear in her work– community, friendship and collaboration were important to her. Her work is an extension of who she was, warm, capacious and nuanced. Her Belladonna* chapbook The Putterer’s Notebook privileged the “putterer” and the notational. Her chapbook gives a sense of her innovation (just even typographically) and the restlessness and movement in the text:
http://www.mazzastudio.com/images/design/PDFs/Oliver-Putterers-Notebook-singles.pdf
Nightboat books has just reprinted The she said dialogues, in which Oliver described the poems as a means to”investigate the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness (as both a personal identity and a non-essentialist historical notion), sexuality and language.” Read an excerpt below:
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/02/poetry/from-the-she-said-dialogues-flesh-memory
– By: Jennifer Firestone
2021 Akilah Oliver Award
This award commemorates Akilah Oliver, a poet, performer, activist, and Lang professor, whose courses challenged students not only to engage poetic texts but also the criticism and conversations that surround them. This award recognizes a student poet at Lang whose poetry has some of the features of Akilah’s writing and teaching.
Remembering Robin Mookerjee
Robin Mookerjee began teaching at Lang in 2000 as the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum (the First-Year Writing Program at the time) and went on to teach Fiction, Poetry, and Literature in Writing and Literary Studies, for which he also served terms as Chair and Advisor, until his death in May of 2016. A beloved and iconoclastic teacher, Robin had wide and varied intellectual and artistic interests: he was a poet, fiction writer, literary scholar, and musician who taught on a wealth of topics, including Anglo-American poetry, transgressive fiction (about which he wrote a book), experimental modernist writers, cyberpunk, and so on. Ever challenging (in his words), “the false certainties that would model knowledge and experience,” Robin was known among colleagues for his wry wit, sly humor, and devilish irony as well as his abiding punk-rock sensibility.
– By: Dr. James Fuerst
Robin Mookerjee Award
This award commemorates Robin Mookerjee, a scholar, creative writer, and Lang professor, whose creativity, humor, and passion for literature inspired students and colleagues alike. This award recognizes a Lang student whose creativity and passion for literature have some of the features of Robin’s writing and teaching.
