Wendy Xu is a poet and writer, most recently the author of the poetry collections The Past (2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, Conjunctions, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and widely elsewhere. A new book of essays on poetics entitled Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds was published October 2025 by the Poets on Poetry Series. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, Xu is currently assistant professor of writing at The New School in New York City. Professor Camille F. Forbes is a storyteller and a scholar. Her projects are informed by archival research, shaped by the burdens and freedoms afforded by engagement with the historical record. She’s obsessed with gaps—the spaces in the historical record where absence often indicates the violence of erasure and omission. Narrative becomes for her a process of making visible, troubling the rendering of, and imaginatively evoking, neglected and ignored Black actors in history. A former Kimbilio, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and Hambidge fellow, Professor Forbes has had her fiction published in Callaloo and Obsidian, among other journals. Her current work-in-progress is a historical novel set during the Civil War titled "Minding The Territory." Professor Forbes holds an MA in History and a PhD in American Civilization from Harvard University. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Literature UCSD, and is author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star.
Admission/Cost: FREE
Location:
Geisel Library
UCSD
San Diego, CA
Wednesday, February 25 - 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
