VCU news

In addition to the VCU School of the Arts, many other programs will be offering enriching cultural events this spring.

The Department of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences continues its monthly Visiting Writers Series on Jan. 16 with Phillip Lopate, the essayist, fiction writer and poet, and Claudia Emerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of English at VCU. The novelist and nonfiction writer Ann Hood (“The Red Thread,” “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief”) and the poet Major Jackson (“Hoops,” “Leaving Saturn”) will read on Feb. 6.

On March 20, Richard Bausch, an acknowledged master of the short story form, will read with the winner of the Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize, an annual prize awarded to the best short story published during a year in Blackbird, the online journal of the VCU Department of English and New Virginia Review, Inc.

Elsewhere in the college, the Department of History presents the Southern Film Festival in February. This year’s theme, “Sports in the South,” focuses on a wide range of sports from football to roller derby. “Remember the Titans” and “Secretariat” will screen Feb 7. “Mickey: A Family Story,” “Greased Lightning,” “Whip It!” “Johnnie and Arthur Ashe” and an excerpt from the upcoming “Althea” play Feb. 8.

Ongoing series include the School of World Studies’ Anthropology Speaker Series and the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies’ lecture.

The Huffington Post’s Paul Raushenbush, senior religious editor, presents the spring’s first lecture in the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies Lecture Series March 19. Writer Phyllis Theroux lectures for the series April 2.

Religious Studies talks this semester continue with the Third Annual Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Catholic Studies Symposium April 8; the 21st Annual William E. & Miriam S. Blake Lecture in History of Christianity, featuring Elizabeth A. Clark, Ph.D., Duke University, April 10; and the Sixth Annual Powell-Edwards Lecture in Religion and The Arts, featuring Vera Kononova Brown, April 14.

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