UA’s Bankhead Visiting Writers Series Welcomes Yunte Huang and Simon Ortiz

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The University of Alabama’s Bankhead Visiting Writers Series will host authors Yunte Huang and Simon Ortiz at 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 1, 2002, at the Ferguson Forum in the Ferguson Center on UA’s campus.

Dr. Yunte Huang, of the department of English and American literature and language at Harvard University, received his master’s from The University of Alabama. He is the author of “Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth Century American Literature.”

He has translated poems by Ezra Pound in “The Pisan Cantos and Selected Essays of Ezra Pound.” Besides being a successful critic and translator, Huang also is a poet, and he will read from his original work.

Simon J. Ortiz is a member of the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico and teaches in the English department at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of 19 books of poetry and prose, including “After and Before Lightning,” “Woven Stone” and “Men on the Moon: Collected Stories.”

Ortiz has served as an editor of several anthologies of Native American writing, including “Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature” and “Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing.” His most recent book of poems, “From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which is Our America” was published in 2000 by the University of Arizona Press.

Both Ortiz and Huang will be on campus as part of the 26th Annual English Department Symposium from Oct. 31 – Nov 2. This year’s focus is on English and Ethnicity. For more information on the Symposium visit http://www.as.ua.edu/english/.

The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series is made possible by an endowment from the Bankhead Foundation, The University of Alabama’s Program in Creative Writing, the department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, please contact UA’s creative writing program at 205/348-0766 or visit http://bama.ua.edu/~writing/.