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Levine, Glover to appear at University Lecture Series

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By Shirley Melikian Armbruster

Pulitzer Prize-winning Fresno poet Philip Levine and popular movie actor Danny Glover will headline the spring University Lecture Series lineup, which also includes other poets, musicians, an agricultural analyst and a children's author.

The series starts Feb. 6 with the Manding Music and Dance Society, headed by Alhaji Papa Susso, master kora player, oral historian and director of the Koriya Musa Center for Research in Oral Tradition in The Gambia. The appearance is co-sponsored by the Ethnic Studies Program.

Papa Susso was the chief kora (21-stringed harp-lute) player of The Gambia National Cultural Troupe until 1974, when he formed his own cultural organization to research and preserve the music and folklore of the Manding people of west Africa.

Glover will appear March 5 with Bill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum, to talk about the work of that organization, which promotes and works for the advancement of human rights and sustained economic development for the nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

Best known to general audiences as the older, more cautious partner of the volatile Mel Gibson in the popular "Lethal Weapon" movies, Glover spent most of the 1990s producing and starring in critically acclaimed films that explored different historical issues black people have faced in the United States and in Africa.

Levine will appear on March 11 with poet-author Al Young and Sascha Feinstein, associate professor of English at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA.

Levine was a professor of English at Fresno State from 1958-1992 and was named the Outstanding Professor in the California State University system in 1972. He has received numerous grants, fellowships and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1995 for "The Simple Truth: Poems." He lives half the year in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., and half in Fresno.

Young, a resident of Palo Alto, is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and his memoir, "Bodies and Soul: Musical Memoirs" (1981), which won the American Book Award. Feinstein co-directs the Creative Writing Program at Lycoming College and edits Brilliant Corners:  A Journal of Jazz and Literature.

Other spring University Lecture Series programs are as follows:

Dennis T. Avery, Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute and director of the Center for Global Food Issues, on March 18. His topic is "Protecting Nature in the 21st Century with High-Yield Farming and Forestry." He is the author of "Global Food Progress 1991" and "Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming."

Sonia Sanchez, a teacher and poet who lives in Philadelphia, on April 1.                    

A powerful advocate of black studies programs in the 1970s, her later poetry volumes are feminist in orientation. One of her most celebrated volumes is "Homegirls & Handgrenades" (1984), a collection of autobiographical prose poems that received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Sanchez's appearance is in conjunction with Diversity Week at Fresno State.

Children's author Ann Thwaite will conclude the lecture series with "Who Wrote Winnie-the-Pooh?" on April 24. The noted British biographer is presented in partnership with the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children's Literature. Among Thwaite's awards is the 1990 Whitbread Biography of the Year Award for her book "A.A. Milne: His Life."

University Lecture Series programs start at 7:30 p.m. All will be held in the Satellite Student Union, except the Danny Glover-Bill Fletcher appearance on March 5. That lecture will be in the North Gym.

Tickets are available at the University Student Union Information Desk and at Borders.  Single-event tickets are $10 general admission; $6 Fresno State faculty, staff, Alumni Association members and seniors; $5 elementary and secondary students; and $2 Fresno State students. Ticket prices on the day of the event increase by $2 for general admission, faculty, staff and Alumni Association members.

For more information contact the University Lecture Series office at 8-4680 or see www.csufresno.edu/universitylecture.         

Back to University Journal, 2/03 Issue