Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Two Ways of Looking at Elizabeth Bishop with Megan Marshall and Kenneth Gross

Two Ways of Looking at Elizabeth Bishop with Megan Marshall and Kenneth Gross

Elizabeth Bishop was a great poet of memory. She mined her childhood experience in prose, wrote poems from a child’s perspective, and, in retrospective narrative verse, established herself as the Wordsworth of her age.  In this seminar, the biographer Megan Marshall and the literary critic Kenneth Gross will combine biographical explication and close reading of texts to  explore Bishop’s youth—a period of radical dislocation and loss as well as of self-discovery—and the ways in which Bishop transformed her life into poetry.

Megan Marshall, an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Emerson college, is the author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, which won several prizes. Marshall’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The London Review of Books, among other publications. This year at the Cullman Center she is writing a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reclusive sister, Elizabeth.

Kenneth Gross is the Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English at Rochester University. His numerous books include The Dream of the Moving Statue, Shakespeare’s Noise, Shylock is Shakespeare, and, most recently, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, co-winner of the 2011-2012 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. At the Cullman Center he is working on a book about lyric poetry.

The deadline to apply to this seminar has passed.