Monday, March 12, 2007 | 7:37 a.m.
The literati are coming.
Former UNLV President Carol Harter's dream of developing a think tank of writers and artists within the university to promote high-brow discussions of the world's problems has taken several leaps forward in recent months.
Last semester Harter launched her Black Mountain Institute with a series of guest lectures and poetry readings. This spring the institute has grown more ambitious, with a panel of experts later this month reexamining the Vietnam War in light of Iraq, and acclaimed poet and playwright Derek Walcott, a Nobel laureate, teaching at the university in April.
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is also back at UNLV as a senior fellow for the Black Mountain Institute, participating in public lectures and classroom discussions and helping Harter to rei n in more top writers to the university.
The goal is to stimulate interest in world events.
"So many people are hungry for engagement with issues, hungry for an intellectual life again," said Richard Wiley, associate director for the Black Mountain Institute. "We feel, I feel, that we can give that to them, spark that in them, through bringing luminary writers of all sorts to the campus."
The Vietnam panel on March 21 features Vietnam-era writers Robert Stone and Tim O'Brien, acclaimed historian Charles Herring, former Marine and Iraq war veteran-turned-conscientious objector Jimmy Castellanos and UNLV Schaeffer Fellow Vu Tran, an O. Henry short-story award winner who grew up in Vietnam in the aftermath of the war. The panel will be moderated by UNLV history professor Andy Fry .
"Remembering the Vietnam War and the 1960s, we thought it was going to be a cultural revolution that would make the world utterly different," Wiley said. But, for the populous, the effect was minimal.
This fall UNLV will publish its first edition of Witness, a literary journal purchased for the International Institute of Modern Letters by its founder, Fontainebleau Resorts President Glenn Schaeffer.
The university also will host its first two writing fellows later this year. The fellowships, which include $50,000 stipends paid for by private donors, are designed to encourage the work of midcareer writers and engage those writers in the efforts of Black Mountain and the academic life of UNLV.
Also in the fall, UNLV will unveil its first sustained discourse on world issues by hosting a series of lectures and events on issues plaguing Africa, including apartheid and genocide in Darfur. The lectures will focus on Africa's inability to sustain attention from the global community on its plights, said Wiley, who read from his new novel "Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show" in a lecture Wednesday.
Later the institute is planning a discourse on the repression of women, looking at religious, cultural and political sensitivities that place restrictions on the roles of women within a community.
UNLV also continues to partner with the North American Cities of Asylum project in offering support and housing to persecuted writers. Chinese writer Er Tai Gao is finishing his time in the city and a new writer is expected this summer.
archive
