Humanities Events
Humanities Event Series
The Humanities Event Series invites students to engage with the ancient and modern core texts we teach in our courses in ways that encourage students to self-consciously reflect on what gives one’s life value and meaning. With each new event, we hope to create and strengthen partnerships with other colleges, academic departments, and campus organizations that result in a more connected and engaged student community.
Victoria Chang: Poetry Reading and Q&A
Thursday, May 9 | 6:00 - 7:30pm
Join us for the 6th installment of the Humanities Event Series, featuring Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World.
“This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face / the front.” So Victoria Chang begins her new collection of poems, With My Back to the World (2024), which engages with the paintings and writings of the abstract artist, Agnes Martin. The collection continues Chang’s radical use of poetic language and form to explore the interior life of the self as we navigate the death, grief, depression, and the challenges of a world too often marked by indifference or violence. Chang’s willingness to “let language face the front” creates many opportunities in her poetry for wonder, beauty, and humor.
In addition to With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang is the author of The Trees Witness Everything (2022); the nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (2021); and Obit (2020), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.
Artwork by Amelia Jeun, Revelle College '26.
Registration
Poetry Reading and Q+A
Join us for the 6th installment of the Humanities Event Series, featuring Victoria Chang. Ms. Chang will be reading from her newest collection of poetry, With My Back to the World.
Tea Time Chat with Victoria Chang
Undergraduate students, join us for an intimate, student-led conversation with Victoria Chang on the topics of making art, family, loss, and identity.
