Authors Unbound 2024-25: Celebrating Writing Across Genres

The Gordon Library is excited to announce Authors Unbound, a series of events in C and D terms that will feature informal conversations with WPI and other area scholars and writers about their vision, process, innovations and challenges as authors writing across multiple genres. 

Details on locations and programs will be announced for each event and also added here throughout the spring:

• On January 22, at 3pm, the series will kick off with Ludic Soundscapes: Music, Sonic Environments, and Video Games, a conversation about a 2024 publication co-edited by Dr. Elizabeth Hambleton (Gordon Library), and Professor Kate Galloway (RPI).  
   
• On January 28, at 1pm WPI Chemistry & Biochemistry Professors Anita Mattson and Raul Orduna Picon will share their innovative work in The Chemistry of Belonging:  A Graphic Novel Approach to Organic Chemistry Education.
   
• On February 13, at 3 pm, WPI HUA Professors Joel Brattin and Lance Schachterle will introduce us to their work as expert textual editors of works by Charles Dickens and J. Fenimore Cooper, in an interactive program about Great Editions:  The Scholarship of Textual Editing.
   
• On February 21 at 11am, WPI HUA Professor Lucy Caplan will host Maud Cuney-Hare: Musician, Scholar, Writer, Activist, at the opening at Gordon Library of her exhibit on the life and work of Maud Cuney Hare (1874-1936), an African-American scholar, writer, composer and activist with deep roots in the Boston area. 
   
• Another C Term event (date and time TBD) will feature School of Business Professor Martin Burt, sharing his newly revised edition of Who Owns Poverty (2025), one of the first publications of our own WPI Press.
   
• On March 19 at 4pm, Global School Dean Mimi Sheller will be joined by Northeastern University’s Professor Adriana de Souza e Silva to discuss how their co-editing is shaping emerging fields of global scholarship, with a program on Mobility Justice and Mobile Networked Creativity.  This event is also part of a city-wide spring event series on sustainability, organized by the Worcester-area association of Worcester’s research and academic libraries (Academic and Research Collaborative). 
   
• Crowning the 2025 spring series on April 17 at 4 pm will be WPI Library’s first annual Olive Higgins Prouty Poetry Celebration, featuring National Book Award winner, poet, and UMass Amherst Professor Martín Espada, reading from his award-winning book Floaters (2021), and his new book Jailbreak of Sparrows (April 2025).  Espada's reading has been organized and made possible in collaboration with the WPI School of Arts & Sciences, the Worcester County Poetry Association, and the Clemente Course in the Humanities.

Please mark your calendars now, and join us in explorations and conversations that celebrate and share the shaping power of authorship across every genre!