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  • Throws and Prose

    Throws and Prose

    Can you SPARE a night to write with us? The English M.A./M.F.A. Program will be holding a fun, exciting event on campus on November 11 from 5-7 p.m.

    What’s more fun than bowling AND writing? This event is right up your alley. Join us as a bowler or a spectator…we’ll spend time in the alley and then move to the gym for some writing, refreshments, and an open mic. There is a limited amount of bowlers allowed, so please, RSVP to attend. Shoes and ball are included in your registration. RSVP to mmcbride@monmouth.edu.

  • A Conversation with Robert Pinsky

    Join former three-term US Poet Laureate and Long Branch, NJ native Robert Pinsky for an evening of conversation in celebration of the release of his memoir Jersey Breaks.  The evening will be moderated by the Dean of The Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, David Hamilton Golland, Ph.D.

    “Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore.” – Bruce Springsteen

    The acclaimed poet takes an affectionate look back. The U.S. poet laureate from 1997 to 2000 and “an expert at nothing except the sounds of sentences in the English language,” Pinsky (b. 1940) moves back and forth in time, narrating his life in crisp, self-deprecating prose. “If I have a story to tell,” he writes, “it’s how the failures and aspirations of a certain time and place led to poetry.” That place was Long Branch, New Jersey, where the author grew up in an Orthodox, lower-middle-class family in a neighborhood that was both poor and segregated. In the “sounds of Hebrew,” Pinsky heard Milton, Blake, and Whitman. He recalls reading stories and poems in the glossy magazines in his optician father’s waiting room as well as the “exact moment when I became a writer,” thanks to Through the Looking Glass. As an “ambitious, pseudointellectual freshman” at Rutgers University, he encountered and enjoyed Ulysses and the poetry of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg. Pinsky confesses that his way of writing a poem stems from getting a “tune in my head…like noodling at the piano,” and his approach fostered his popular Favorite Poem Project, which combined the “appeal of gossip with the appeal of art.”

    Though the author loved playing music, poetry came first in college, and he explains how his “habit of thinking about names was essential to my work as a poet.” He lavishes praise on two cantankerous college teachers—Paul Fussell and “relentless dictator” Yvor Winters—as well as his friend and mentor Thom Gunn. When teaching at Wellesley in 1970, Pinsky attended Robert Lowell’s “erratic writing workshop,” and Lowell gave him a blurb for his first collection, Sadness and Happiness. Throughout, the author sharply dissects a variety of poems, including his own, and he excitedly explains the welcome challenge of translating Dante’s Inferno.

    Fans of literature will relish Pinsky’s jocular recollections and infectious love of poetry.

  • Monmouth Hawk Night

    Calling All Storytellers

    Have you ever woken up laughing from a funny dream? Do you dream of what the future might hold? Had a terrifying nightmare? Gotten caught daydreaming in class?

    Tell Us Your Dreams

    Come for a night of storytelling and fun as The Monmouth Review and Commworks Present: Monmouth Hawk Night

    There will be snacks and prizes!

    Event Links

  • Ricky Tucker

    Please join us for a reading by Ricky Tucker. Tucker is a storyteller, an educator, a lead creative, and an art critic based in NYC. His work explores the imprints of art and memory on narrative, and the absurdity of most fleeting moments. He has written for the Paris Review, the Tenth Magazine, and Public Seminar, among others, and has performed for reading series including the Moth Grand SLAM, Sister Spit, Born: Free, and Spark London. In 2017, he was chosen as a Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Fellow for creative nonfiction.

    Please RSVP for the event to: mmcbride@monmouth.edu

  • Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.

    From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, comes the instant New York Times bestseller that is a “wildly inventive, a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences” (The New York Times Book Review).

    Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of 2021, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

    Famous for juxtaposing Eastern cultures with Western literary references, The Waste Land has been celebrated for its eloquence, depth of meaning and numerous subtleties. Quickly ascending to the status of literary classic, The Waste Land is widely considered by literary scholars to be Eliot’s finest poem, representing a maturity in his style and a confidence in both expression and in research.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country.

    First published in 1913, Edith Wharton’s The Custom Of The Country is scathing novel of ambition featuring one of the most ruthless heroines in literature. Undine Spragg is as unscrupulous as she is magnetically beautiful. Her rise to the top of New York’s high society from the nouveau riche provides a provocative commentary on the upwardly mobile and the aspirations that eventually cause their ruin. One of Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The Custom Of The Country is a stunning indictment of materialism and misplaced values that is as powerful today for its astute observations about greed and power as when it was written nearly a century ago.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Questlove’s Music Is History

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Questlove’s Music Is History.

    Music Is History combines Questlove’s deep musical expertise with his curiosity about history, examining America over the past fifty years.

    Focusing on the years 1971 to the present, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapes- try, whether investigating how the blaxploitation era reshaped Black identity or considering the way disco took an assembly-line approach to Black genius. And these critical inquiries are complemented by his own memories as a music fan, and the way his appetite for pop culture taught him about America.

    A history of the last half-century and an intimate conversation with one of music’s most influential and original voices, Music Is History is a singular look at contemporary America.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer.

    A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.

    The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

  • Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is NATIONAL BESTSELLER Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

    An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. Now an original series on HBO Max.

    Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.