Society & Culture

Poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs to visit UGA

Poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs to visit UGA

Athens, Ga. – Poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs, who have collaborated on the recordings Thiefth (Blue Chopsticks, 2005) and Souls of the Labadie Tract (Blue Chopsticks, 2007), will perform together on Thursday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. in the Edge Recital Hall in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music. Earlier in the day, Howe and Grubbs will offer a question-and-answer session from 3:30-4:45 p.m. in Park Hall, Room 265 on the UGA campus. The two events, sponsored by the department of English, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, and Verse Journal, are free and open to the public.

Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and literary criticism, Howe’s most recent collection of poems is Souls of the Labadie Tract (New Directions, 2007). Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger.Théâtre Typographique has published Thorow, Marginalia de Melville, and Deux et., translated into French by Bernard Rival. Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Howe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a chancellor to the Academy of American Poets. Recently she received a 2009 Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin.

Grubbs, assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate program in performance and interactive media arts, has released ten solo albums, the most recent of which is An Optimist Notes the Dusk (Drag City). He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin and Stephen Prina. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and directs the Blue Chopsticks record label. A 2005-06 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, he has been called one of two best teachers for an Indie-rocker to admire in the Village Voice and “le plus français des américains” in Libération.