Join the celebrated Greek-American poet, writer, and “master of mixing genres” as she reads from her work in progress, a memoir-verse-image-novel, the third of a series of hybrid ancestral encounters, this time considering her great grandparents, Eva Palmer Sikelianos and Angelos Sikelianos.
Abstract
Evalina Palmer (1874-1952) was an American heiress obsessed with the ancient Greeks. Angelos Sikelianos (1884-1951) was a Greek poet obsessed with Ancient Greece and the Greeks of his time. Together, they implemented a vision of reviving the ancient festivals and plays at Delphi with the goal of bringing about world peace. They begat Glafkos, who moved to the U.S. and begat my father, Jon. By the time I was born, seemingly vast fortunes had been spent on this vision, all ancestral belongings lost. My father drifted off into homelessness and heroin. There I was, a child living in trailers or wandering the fields near our Section 8 housing block, panhandling in the park for snacks, with little idea who these old visionaries in my lineage were. That’s where my work begins.
Bio
Born into a family of bohemians, poets, ne’er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Goleta, and now lives in Providence, where she teaches Literary Arts at Brown University. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Her tenth book of poetry, Your Kingdom came out in 2023. Those ten volumes are in company with two hybrid memoir-novels. More info at : https://www.elenisikelianos.com. Insta: @elenisikelianos
Date: Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024
Time: 7-8 pm (light refreshments to follow)
Location: Senator Nicholas Petris Room, Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection (Library 3023)