Postscripts

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Austin International Poetry Festival, etc.

The Austin International Poetry Festival (AIPF) is one of the largest open poetry festivals in the nation "if not the world," AIPF organizers say. Now in its ninth year, AIPF takes place April 19-22 at a variety of venues around town from bookstores to the Heritage House (810 E. 13th); all of the events are free. James Hoggard, who was recently Texas' poet laureate, is one of the featured poets, as are David Watts, an NPR commentator and author of Taking the History and Making; Jane Baranow, who's married to Watts and whose first full-length book of poetry, Living Apart, has recently been published; Gayle Danley, the 1994 National Poetry Slam champion, and Cyrus Cassells, who teaches poetry at SWT and is the author of The Mud Actor, which won the National Poetry Series Prize; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting, winner of the 1994 William Carlos Williams Award and named one of the Best Books of 1994 by Publishers Weekly; Beautiful Signor, winner of the 1998 Lambda Literary Award; and is the winner of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and the Peter I.B.Lavan Younger Poet Award from the American Academy of Poets. See www.aipf.org for a complete schedule or call 502-8294 for more information… Scottish writer James Kelman, who won the Booker Prize in 1995 for How late it was, how late, has been teaching at UT this spring, his third semester there. On Monday, April 23, at 7:30 at the Cactus Cafe in the Texas Union, Kelman will read extracts from Translated Accounts, his first novel since How late it was, how late. It's slated for publication in the UK in June. "Set in an unnamed territory or country that appears to be under military rule, its anonymous narrators struggle to recount their experiences," is how his publisher describes it. Kelman says the event is "not quite a preview" (he will read extracts from Translated Accounts but also from earlier works). Among Kelman's guests is Scottish singer-songwriter Friday Flynn, who now lives in Austin… A symposium titled "The Nobel Prizes: A Legacy of Achievement" takes place this Saturday on the UT campus, and anyone who is interested is encouraged to attend. At 9am in the Knopf Room on the fourth floor of the Flawn Academic Center (by the West Mall), there will be a free continental breakfast, and then at 10:15, UT professor Steven Weinberg, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, will talk about "the Nobel Experience," after which the audience can ask questions. At 12:30pm, Madeleine Gustafsson, columnist and cultural affairs reporter for Dagens Nyheter in Stockholm, will talk about how the media in Sweden and beyond see the Nobel Prizes, and what cultural force it can exert. Then a series of Nobel Prize-winning writers will be introduced "in the words of the dialogues they had with the Swedish Academy as they are acknowledged in the official press releases announcing their prizes and as they respond with their acceptance speeches." In addition, on Friday, April 20, Bille August's Jerusalem (1996), based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, will be shown in Goldsmith Hall room 3.120 at 7pm, and on Saturday night, Hamsun (1997), based on the life of a Nobel Prize-winning author and his trial for collaboration with the Nazis will be screened, same place, same time as Friday night. For more information, see www.utexas.edu/depts/german/swede2001/nobel.html or call 471-4123.