10:00-11:30 AM: Shelton Johnson, “Gloryland: Literature and Interpretive History as Tools for Social Change” (University of Missouri-St. Louis, Century Rooms, 3rd floor Milleninum Student Center)
Shelton Johnson is a Park Interpreter at Yosemite National Park and a novelist. Featured in Ken Burns’s film series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, he talks about his research into the African-American Cavalry officers who served as the first guards for the early National Park, Yosemite. Johnson will read from his novel Gloryland (2011), about a Calvary guard and his family, which Johnson spun from his park research. Johnson, who grow up in Detroit, discusses his concerns about the low numbers of minority visitors to the National Parks and why we need to work to ensure that all Americans feel welcome and at home in the Parks and other natural areas of America, which should be comfortable places for all of us. Gloryland will be available for signing.
The event is free and open to the public. No registration needed. Call (314) 516-5698 for more information. This program is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at UMSL, with partial support provided to the Center’s Reading Series by the Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council. Disabled accessible. Near MetroLink North UMSL station. Parking in Lot C, south of Millennium Student Center.
2:30-4:00 PM: Brian Turner and Veterans (Webster University, the East Academic Building, Room 253, Big Bend Blvd., Webster Groves)
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise (2010) and Here, Bullet (2005) which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA “Best in the West” award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, the Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. Turner was also featured in Operation Homecoming, a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women through their own words. Turner was selected as one of 50 United States Artists Fellows.
Also on the program will be readings by a Missouri veteran who has submitted a piece for an upcoming MHC-sponsored anthology of veterans’ poems and stories, and by veterans who participated in creative writing workshops at the Jefferson Barracks VA medical center which were co-sponsored by MHC, the Missouri Writers’ Guild and the VA. Missouri poet laureate and Webster professor David Clewell will be the master of ceremonies
The event is free and open to the public. No registration needed. Call (314) 968-7054 for more information. This program is sponsored by Webster University and the Missouri Humanities Council. Parking in lot H and J, and limited street parking on Big Bend Blvd.
1:00-4:00 PM: Battle for Brooklyn, June 2011, 93 minutes (Washington University in St. Louis, Brown Hall, Rm. 100)
Battle for Brooklyn, the controversial documentary by acclaimed filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley (Horns and Halos) tells of one Brooklyn neighborhood’s battle against the corporate developers of the Atlantic Yards project. It is an intimate look at the very public and passionate fight waged by residents and business owners of Brooklyn’s historic Prospect Heights neighborhood facing condemnation of their property to make way for the Atlantic Yards project, a massive plan to build 16 skyscrapers and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets. The film focuses on graphic designer Daniel Goldstein, whose apartment sits at what would be center court of the new arena. A reluctant activist, Daniel is dragged into the fight because he can’t accept that the government should use the power of eminent domain to take his new apartment and hand it off to a private developer. Daniel and a host of Brooklynites form the group “Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn” to pursue alternate plans to the developer’s proposal. Along the way, Daniel loses a fiancé, falls in love again, gets married and starts a family. Battle for Brooklyn is a thoroughly engaging look at the infuriating erosion of individual rights in the interest of corporate concerns and political maneuvering.
Q and A with filmmaker Michael Galinsky and Bruce Lindsey, Dean of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit http://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu/.
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