A contemporary voice echoes with Shakespeare’s language; a dialogue across four centuries.
Neal Hall reads from The Trembling Tiber, his award-winning poetry collection that enters into a conversation with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The reading is followed by a discussion with Arul Mani, and an audience Q&A.
The collection emerged during Hall’s residency as an Artist-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome, after he was stopped at gunpoint by Italian Special Forces while walking through an all-white area of the city on the Ides of March. That convergence of place, history, and date became the catalyst for this work, which is not an adaptation of Julius Caesar but a conversation with it, in which the past speaks to the present and the present answers back.
Venue: Seminar Halls
Speakers
Neal Hall
Neal Hall, M.D., a graduate of Cornell and Harvard, is an award-winning human rights poet who has performed readings throughout the U.S. and internationally. He has published eight books, including Appalling Silence and the award-winning The System We Caste, both written and published in India. His work has been translated into seven languages, including Telugu, Urdu, and Kannada. Hailed as the “Malcolm X of International Poetry,” he has been praised by Professor Cornel West, Professor Laoutaris of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Institute, and India’s Vasanth Kannabiran. His honours include readings at the Shakespeare Institute and the historic 1824 Shakespeare Club, and the Wingword International Poetry Prize in Delhi.
Arul Mani
Arul Mani teaches English at St. Joseph’s University and has been one of the curators of the campus literature festival, Meta, since 2013.
