New Writing Series: Judith Peraino, Tom McEnaney, and Anna Joy Springer

About

About New Writing Series

UC San Diego’s New Writing Series invites local, national, and international authors to read and perform throughout the academic year. Welcoming a wide range of authors and genres, including playwrights, poets, translators, essayists, critics, fiction writers, and performance artists, the New Writing Series celebrates both emerging and established award-winning writers. Readers also include Department of Literature faculty and graduate students in the MFA Program in Writing. The readings are followed by in-depth question and answer periods that center on craft and artistic practice.

The New Writing Series is co-sponsored by the Department of Literature, Department of Music, and the UC San Diego Library’s Special Collections & Archives.

Recordings of New Writing Series readings, as well as its predecessor, the New Poetry Series, which dates back to 1972, are part of the Archive for New Poetry in UC San Diego Library’s Special Collections & Archives.

This New Writing Series event features readings from Judith Peraino, Tom McEnaney, and Anna Joy Springer.

Judith A. Peraino is Professor of Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. Her publications include articles on medieval music, Blondie, David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, and Pussy Riot; and the books Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig, and Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut. She is co-author (with Tom McEnaney) of We’re Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond.

Tom McEnaney (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese, UC Berkeley) writes about sonic media, music, and literature from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. He is the author of Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas (2017), and many articles in venues like diacritics, the Journal of Musicology, PMLA, Representations, and Revista de estudios hispánicos. He is an Associate Professor in the departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese, and craiglist Distinguished Chair in New Media at UC Berkeley, as well as co-director of the UC-Cuba Academic Initiative.

Anna Joy Springer (she, they) is a lifelong Californian whose artistic work uses fantastical, speculative, and other figurative modes to explore the nature of interbeing and to register lesser cultural currents through writing and pictures. She is author of The Birdwisher, The Vicious Red Relic, Love, and The Forests of the Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Companion to the Memoir, along with other publications across genres. Frontwoman of former punk bands Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, Anna Joy’s hardcore full-throated feminism inflects a wildly responsive performance style that’s saturated in femme camp, intellectual reflexivity, and political outrage. Anna Joy widely toured the U.S. and Europe in the 1990’s in her bands and as a member of Sister Spit, a queer feminist troupe of writers. Records featuring her bands and literary projects are available on digital platforms, CD, and vinyl. Currently an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, Anna Joy got a B.A. in Humanities from New College of California with support from a Pell Grant and continued her education at Brown University, where she was awarded an M.F.A. in Literary Arts (Fiction) as well as the John Assatly Memorial Award in Fiction and the Weston Family Prize in Creative Writing, Fiction. Deeply influenced by student-centered social justice pedagogies, Anna Joy helped design and direct UCSD’s cross-genre MFA program in literary arts, receiving a Distinguished Teaching Award for excellence in instruction. She’s also the recipient of Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Award for Excellence in Performing and Visual Arts, two fellowship awards from the Hellman Foundation, and a Dean’s Innovation Award. Both in the academy and in other settings, she teaches a wide range of writing, graphic texts, and embodied mindfulness courses incorporating over twenty years of experience as professional writing instructor. Anna Joy is student of both Zen and Theravadan Buddhist practices. Birds and bird symbology remain favorite subjects, so Anna Joy is grateful to live with her beloved and many pets in Southern California, surrounded by woodpeckers and screech owls.