Reading Series: Mary Leader

by Lindsey Alexander, Visiting Writers Series Coordinator

More than 120 people crowded Krannert Auditorium to hear Mary Leader read from her latest collection, Beyond the Fire, last week.  These poems explore themes of heritage—Leader’s hometown, Pawnee, Oklahoma, appears in the text—but also feminism, romantic love, and family. Alternating wonderfully personal moments of self-doubt with voices that seem to come from “anonymous scribes,” Leader shared with her audience the new expressions possible in her experimental poetic forms.

Her poem “They Vibrate,” which replicates the texture of woven art and blurs the sound and appearance of pairs of words across many different lines, was projected on a screen behind her during the reading.

Leader said her obsession with the colors red and blue, as well as their optic effects on the mind, has seeped into Beyond the Fire. In the Q and A, the colors and visual textures in her …MORE

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A Storytelling Species: Rebecca Skloot

by Joshua Diamond, Nonfiction Co-Editor

Sunday afternoon in August. Pleasantly temperate for Indiana this time of year. And 5,500 undergraduates—most of them first-year students at Purdue University—are funneling into Elliot Hall of Music. No, this is not the rescheduled Lady Gaga concert. They’re here to see Rebecca Skloot, whose wildly successful book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, has spent 29 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list with no signs of slowing down.

All first-year students at Purdue received Skloot’s book over the summer, free of charge, as part of the University’s Common Reading Program, which offers a different book each year in order to provide “a common first-year experience for Purdue’s newest students.”

For the uninitiated, Skloot’s book puts a face to the first immortal cell line. In 1951, doctors took cells from Henrietta Lacks’ cervical tumor without asking, and …MORE

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