The Embarrassment of Genius

The embarrassment of genius—what did being described as genius do to these authors? Readings are followed by a moderated panel discussion as part of an ongoing Literary Festival taking place at the Frye this Fall as part of the exhibition Genius / 21 Century / Seattle. Use the link above to register, seating is limited.

Heather McHugh’s works of poetry, essays, and translation include Dangers (Houghton Mifflin), A World Of Difference (Houghton Mifflin),To The Quick (Wesleyan University Press), Shades (Wesleyan University Press), Eyeshot (Copper Canyon) and Upgraded To Serious (Copper Canyon). She has taught poetry at universities and colleges for forty years, and won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Artists, Guggenheim Foundation, Folger Shakespeare Library, and MacArthur Foundation. In Seattle she started the nonprofit Caregifted for caregiver respite and she is currently finishing a documentary film collaboration with Adam Larsen, showing the intimate home-lives of long-term unpaid caregivers of the severely disabled.

Maged Zaher is the author of Thank You For The Window Office (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), The Revolution Happened And You Didn’t Call Me (Tinfish Press, 2012), and Portrait Of The Poet As An Engineer (Pressed Wafer, 2009). His collaborative work with the Australian poet Pam Brown, Farout Library Software, was published by Tinfish Press in 2007. His translations of contemporary Egyptian poetry have appeared in Jacket Magazine, Banipal, and Denver Quarterly. He performed his work at Subtext, Bumbershoot, the Kootenay School of Writing, St. Marks Project, Evergreen State College, and The American University in Cairo. Maged is the recipient of the 2013 Genius Award in Literature from the The Stranger.

Genius is an unprecedented, large-scale celebration of exceptional multidisciplinary and collaborative artistic practice in Seattle in the twenty-first century. It features over sixty-five visual artists, filmmakers, writers, theater artists, composers, musicians, choreographers, dancers, and arts organizations. The exhibition and its more than forty events will run from September 26, 2015, to January 10, 2016.