Public invited to today’s book launch for Berry professor Sandra Meek

Event to include a reading, signing, book sale, music

The public is invited to a book launch celebrating the newest work by Berry College Professor Sandra Meek at 7:30 p.m. today in the Berry College Chapel.

“Still” is a new book of poetry by Meek, Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at Berry.

In the new collection, Meek subverts Renaissance still-life painting in order to illuminate the perhaps irreparable natural and cultural harm inflicted by colonial forces, even those that manage to create a certain beauty from imperial spoils.

“Still” re-imagines the Renaissance concept of the studiolo, a room displaying cabinets of wonder, each juxtaposing human-made art objects, such as miniature still-life paintings, with natural ones - harbingers of the comimg wonders and catastrophes of travel brought back from distant lands Europeans claimed as “discoveries.”

The event will include a reading, book sale and signing in the Berry College Chapel, immediately followed by a party at the Moon River Room at Harvest Moon Cafe where guests can enjoy gratis heavy hors d’ouevres, cake and soft drinks as well as a cash bar.

Live music will be provided by The Barbaric Yawps.

Meek is the author of six books of poems including “An Ecology of Elsewhere,” “Road Scatter” and “Biogeography,” winner of the Dorset Prize. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.