The Rose Wohlgemuth Weisman Women's Voices Lecture Fund was established in 1993 "to bring outstanding women authors to the University to deliver a "Women's Voices" lecture and engage in other activities to stimulate interest in and appreciation of creative writing by women.
Past Women’s Voices Lectures:
2023
The Power of Intimate Voices: A Talk on Memoir, Journalism, and Queer Latinidad
Daisy Hernandez
How do authors find the courage to write about their lives? How do they write stories about the lives of strangers in an ethical way? Author Daisy Hernández has been writing across literary genres about the intersections of race, immigration, class and sexuality for almost two decades. In this lecture, Hernández discussed how writers create intimacy on the page with themselves and with readers and how this intimacy ultimately speaks to urgent collective experiences of political life. Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, and co-editor of the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism.
2021
A Conversation with Joy Harjo
Critically acclaimed Indigenous poet Joy Harjo discusses her work with Ohio poetlaureate David Lucas. Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, is the author of several books of poetry, as well as collections of interviews and conversations, children’s books, and collaborative art texts. She is the 23rd U.S. poet laureate and the first Native American poet to serve in that position. Among her many honors, Harjo has received the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the American Book Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics.
2018
The New Exploitation Economy
Katherine Boo
In her lecture, Katherine Boo, staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post, provided field notes from global reporting on families who lack privilege and power. Boo’s reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
2016
Mourning for Lost Art
Kamila Shamsi
In times of war, why do armies destroy cultural artifacts? And what does it mean when we, far away onlookers, mourn that destruction even as lives are being lost? In this lecture, Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsi looked at the role of culture, the threat it poses to those who are fighting for an ideology, and the ethics of our reaction to that destruction. It also asks what the word ‘lost’ means in relation to art.