Worlds in Words Translation Series Presents Vivek Narayanan
Thursday, February 21, 2019 6:00 PM to 7:10 PM EST
Peterson Hall, 1113
Mason Creative Writing is proud to announce Worlds In Words, our spring 2019 series of translation talks, sponsored by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, in collaboration with the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center.
Vivek Narayanan’s books of poetry include Universal Beach (Mumbai: Harbour Line, 2006; re-issued, in a re-imagined US edition by ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni in 2011) and Life and Times of Mr S (HarperCollins, 2012). A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16) as part of work for his ongoing current project, an experimental “writing through” of the Sanskrit of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Narayanan is also the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal, forum and publisher founded in 2007. He currently teaches in the Honors College at George Mason University.
As a teacher, Narayanan has tried to reinvent the design of the creative writing workshop, imagining it beyond conventional pedagogy as a more open-ended, inter-media mode of collective and compositional art practice. Over the past two decades or so, he has also extensively explored conceptual approaches to the performance of poetry—including in its potential intersections with technology, physical space, movement, site-specific projects and audience interaction—partly through a series of works in collaboration with the filmmaker Priya Sen, the musician and composer Maarten Visser, the sound artist Sophea Lerner, the dancer and choreographer Padmini Chettur, the conceptual artist Laura Napier, and Insurrections, a South African and Indian collective of poets and musicians. In the mid-2000s, Narayanan was part of Sarai-CSDS, a seminal New Delhi-based organization that brought together visual artists, social scientists, writers, public intellectuals and others to reflect innovatively on new and old media forms and the contemporary global city.
