Faculty Represent Fields of Biology, Earth and Planetary Science, Economics, History
by Andy Fell and Karen Nikos-Rose
April 22, 2021
Four professors from the University of California, Davis, have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Established in 1780, the academy includes Americans with accomplishments in a wide range of fields, including scientists, artists, performers, poets and political leaders.
The newly elected members from UC Davis are: Robert Feenstra, Department of Economics, College of Letters and Science; Jodi Nunnari, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, College of Biological Sciences; Andrés Reséndez, Department of History, College of Letters and Science; and Geerat Vermeij, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, College of Letters and Science.
Rita Dove
In 1993, Rita Dove was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, making her the youngest person – and the first African-American – to receive this highest official honor in American Poetry. She served 1993-1995. In 1999 she was reappointed Special Consultant in Poetry for 1999/2000, The Library of Congress Bicentennial year. From 2004-2006, she served as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Thomas and Beulah” (1987), author of numerous poetry books, a novel, short stories, a play, and is editor of “The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.” Her honors include the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama the only poet ever to receive both medals as well as the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poe
Book: ‘The Poems of Renata Ferreira’ by Frank X. Gaspar – Editor’s Note
Posted on 11 January 2020.
Renata Ferreira’s poems were composed in the final years of Portugal’s fascist regime, exposing and subverting the government’s draconian edicts against women’s rights, sexual freedoms, political dissent, and progressive thought. While she worked in the resistance as a clandestine writer, passing hand-typed bulletins and banned literature throughout Lisbon, her poetry is unmistakably ardent, tender, fraught, erotic, and Sapphic. Presenting the poems of this Portuguese American writer and detailing their surprising rediscovery in 2015, Frank X. Gaspar fuses genres, flouts borders, and brings to life a voice that had been silenced by history and happenstance. As his inventive narrative unfolds, Ferreira emerges, whole and mysterious, offering up her history, her passions, and her art.