Heather Treseler (English) will be giving a talk entitled “Dear Little Mother: John Berryman’s Mad-Mother Muse” at Harvard University with four other poet-critics from across the country on March 7. Her research for this talk was supported with a faculty mini-grant [1], which allowed her to travel to Berryman’s archives in Minnesota. The panel at Harvard is titled “John Berryman’s Legacy of Extreme Expression,” and the event begins at 4 p.m. in the Lamont Library [2], Lamont Forum Room. Treseler will join Poets Kathleen Ossip, Rowan Phillips, and Sasha Steensen. The event is free and open to the public.
Treseler also will be speaking at the Symposium on Michael Harper [3] at the University of Missouri-Columbia on March 13. The title of her talk is “The Poet as Pedagogue,” and she will address how Michael Harper, who has been a professor of poetry at Brown University for over 40 years, uses the classroom, the archive, the office hour, and the writer’s notebook in his teaching and mentoring practices. Professor Harper was Treseler’s undergraduate mentor, and he is considered a major figure in contemporary African American poetry.