Robin Coste Lewis, National Book Award winner and poet laureate of Los Angeles, will give a talk and reading at the inaugural event in the Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion series at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Her lecture, titled "Boarding the Voyage: The Archive as Altar, Research as Ritual," will explore how research and literary efforts toward social change can transform from scholarly engagement into acts of communal devotion. More particularly, it will explore how excavations of race, gender, and desire—and the writing those findings engender—can be metaphorical expressions of faith, and a reclamation of lost deities.
Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is the writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, a Cave Canem fellow, and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.
For more information on this speaker, please visit www.prhspeakers.com. This event will take place in the Sperry Room, Andover Hall, 45 Francis Ave., at 5:15 PM.