Linkages Lecture Series

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Zach Savich’s latest books are the poetry collection Momently (Black Ocean, 2024) and the chapbook The Motherwell Sonnets (The Economy Press, 2023). His dramatic-critical memoir for performance A Field of Telephones, which features Theodore Roethke and the “middle generation” of Modernist poets in the U.S., legacies of experiment, sickness, greatness, dunk tanks, the humanities in an era of leveraging strategic utility sector-wide, and other critical follies will be published by 53rd State Press in 2025. Excerpts have appeared in Autofocus, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.

We are also thrilled to share that both of Éireann Lorsung’s lectures are now available. If you missed her gorgeous talks or would like to revisit them, now’s your chance to read her first and second lectures!

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Application Information

Consideration of candidates for the Fall 2025 Linkages Lecturer will begin in May 2025. You may put forward names for consideration in one of two ways: you may submit your own proposal for two adjacent lectures, or nominate a poet, critic, writer, or literary scholar who you believe would be interested or a good fit for the role. Please find details about the lecture structure, and for how to propose or nominate, below.

1. These lectures may be on any subject of the Linkages Lecturer’s choosing within the realm of poetics, reading, research, writing, or personal experience of any of these. Lecturers may be at any stage of their intellectual career.
   
2. The Linkages Lecturer will give two virtual talks over the course of two weeks and may take place during the months of October, November, or December of the calendar year.
3. Each lecturer should plan for their presentation to be approximately one hour long, including a fifteen-minute question and answer period from the audience.
4. The Linkages Lecturer will receive a modest honorarium of $100 per lecture, along with publication of each lecture.
5.  All proposals or nominations should be received by August 1st, 2025 and on that date of each year going forward. Notifications will be sent by September 15th. Our reading period for Linkages Lectures will begin in 2025 and years following, on May 1st. 

Proposals

Should you like to propose two lectures, please submit the following:

• In your email to annuletpoetics@gmail.com, subject line: “Linkages Lecturer: [Your Name]”, please include as one PDF attachment, each of these parts per individual page: a brief bio note (page 1), a 200-500 word description of each lecture (pages 2-3), which should outline your approach and enumerate the possible subjects you would link together in your lecture, and a sample of your critical writing (page 4).
• Be sure to describe how your two lectures would build upon, contrast, extend, clash, or harmonize, etc, with each other.  
• You may propose lectures that either reflect upon previous or current literary expertise, writing projects or practice, or approaches to poetics (including prose), or you may propose lectures which would require further research into a subject area related to your work, literary interests, or thinking, but that you haven’t had time, rhyme, or reason to as yet explore. 
• The key feature of a Linkages lecture is in the title: we are interested in lectures whose linkages—relations of identified parts to a whole’s particular movement—are explicit, surprising, and express a depth of engagement that’s foundational to your literary thinking, wherever it has verged, or may be verging, and bring something (hopefully!) new to the audience’s attention. While the core of your talks should be rooted in the literary, you are welcome to make linkages between that and any other discipline, from visual art, to ecology, to philosophy or social history, and so on.
• Please include a sample of your critical writing (begin on page 4), whether published (if published, please note the outlet) or as yet unpublished. Your sample should be in either Times New Roman or comparable 12 pt font, and may run from 3 to 10 pages in length, double-spaced. If you have taught at the undergraduate or graduate level, you may submit the text of a lecture you have previously given. Additionally, but not necessarily, you may submit as your sample the opening of your draft of the first lecture.

Nominations

If you’d like to submit a nomination, please include the following:

• In your email to annuletpoetics@gmail.com, subject line: “Linkages Nomination: [Nominee’s Name]”, please include the full name of the person you’re nominating, along with their email address or contact information, if you have access to it. Please also include your name and role (as best you can describe or understand it) in the literary ecosystem ​(reader, editor, student, writer, critic, fan...) or a brief bio note.
• If at all possible, you should let your nominee know in advance that you intend to put their name forward for consideration.
• While we would love to host lecturers with wide and high regard, please keep in mind realistic feasibility when submitting your nomination, or in other words, let’s be real: please consider whether your nominee is generous/kind enough to lecture in exchange for what we have to offer, or whether your nominee would be open to composing and delivering these lectures knowing we have our small honorarium and publication offer to give.
• While not a requirement, you may also include in your nomination a short description of why you think your nominee would be a strong fit for the Linkages Lecturer role, and the nature or level of your familiarity with their work.
• Nominees will be notified in early fall 2025. They will then have the opportunity, should they wish, to submit an abbreviated version of the proposal criteria listed above: two ideas for their respective lectures, approximately 100-300 words, along with a short sample of their critical writing.

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Previous Linkages Lecturers

2023: Éireann Lorsung makes pictures, texts, and objects, and loves to spend time thinking about literature and art in the company of others, especially students. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she currently teaches at University College Dublin. Her most recent collection is The Century (Milkweed, 2020).

Lecture I: On the line
Lecture II: When you get someplace new, learn to read the landscape like an alphabet