Kathryn Davis - ‘Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir’

Novelist Kathryn Davis will discuss her first work of nonfiction, Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir, with David Schuman, director of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, 16 years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can “try on personae like dresses.” She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions — Woolf, Durrell, Bergman — sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, “climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling.”

Kathryn Davis’ hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis’ fiction are recognizable here — fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real — but the vehicle itself is utterly new.

Kathryn Davis is the author of six novels. She has received the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University, and lives in Vermont and St. Louis, Missouri.

20th Annual Mary Meachum Celebration

You're invited to be a part of history in the making at the 20th Annual Mary Meachum Celebration on Saturday, October 1, 2022 at Missouri's first nationally recognized Underground Railroad site - the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing on the Mississippi Greenway.

Each year, this event shines a spotlight on Black St. Louis history through theater performances, music, and activities for the whole family in a festive atmosphere with opportunities to shop, dine, and learn about community resources. The event takes place from 12 pm to 5 pm, but don't miss the main event: historical reenactments looking back over 20 years of celebrations from 3 pm to 4 pm.

The event is FREE and for people of all ages. For more information, visit www.MaryMeachum.org.

The event is significant to the WashU & Slavery project because several of the people who sought freedom by crossing the Mississippi River at this site in 1855 were enslaved by people who founded and shaped Washington University. Learn more about Esther, one of the freedom-seekers, who had been enslaved to WashU benefactor Henry Shaw.

Where is the Mary Meachum Site?

The site is located on the Mississippi Greenway. Several sections of the greenway are currently impacted by construction. To bike or walk to the site, you can park in North Riverfront Park and ride south on the greenway. To drive there, take Highway 70 to Grand Ave: East toward river; North on Hall to Prairie; Right on Prairie to site & parking.

Who was Mary Meachum?

Mary Meachum (1801–1869) and her husband, Reverend John Berry Meachum, were American abolitionists who dedicated their lives to educating and freeing enslaved people.  As part of Reverend Meachum’s church, he established a school for free and enslaved black students called the “The Candle Tallow School.” After the state of Missouri banned all education for black people in 1847, the Meachum’s moved their classes to a steamboat in the middle of the Mississippi River, which was beyond the reach of Missouri law. He provided the school with a library, desks and chairs, and called it the “Floating Freedom School.”  The Meachum’s home on Fourth Street in St. Louis was a safe house on the Underground Railroad. They also helped enslaved people escape to Illinois, where slavery was outlawed. Their work involved considerable risk due to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850- a law authorizing the hunting and capture of escaped enslaved people and requirement that they be returned to their enslavers.

Reverend John Berry Meachum grew up enslaved in Virginia and Kentucky before earning enough money to purchase his freedom. Before leaving Kentucky, he met Mary, an enslaved woman who was set to be moved by her enslavers to St. Louis. John followed Mary to St. Louis where he bought her freedom and eventually established the First African Baptist Church, the first black congregation in St. Louis. After John’s death in 1854, Mary Meachum continued their work educating and freeing enslaved people.

What is the significance of the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing Site?

On the night of May 21, 1855, in the area that is now part of the Mississippi Greenway: Riverfront Trail north of the Merchant’s bridge, Mary Meachum attempted to help a small group of enslaved people cross the Mississippi River to Illinois where slavery was outlawed. However, enslavers and law enforcement officials caught at least five of the enslaved people and arrested Mary for her participation in the plot. She was charged in criminal court for helping the “fugitives” escape. In 2001, the National Park Service recognized the site as part of the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

Observable Readings: Carl Phillips & David Baker

Carl Phillips, professor of English, Washington University, is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022). His honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, Kingsley Tufts Award, Lambda Literary Award, PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Library of Congress, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004).

David Baker is author of 13 books of poetry, most recently Whale Fall, published in July by W. W. Norton, and Swift: New and Selected Poems, as well as six books of prose about poetry. Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Mellon Foundation and Poetry Society of America. Baker’s poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry and The Yale Review. He served for many years as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review, where he continues to curate the annual eco-poetry issue, “Nature’s Nature.” $5 suggested donation. See website for livestream.

Organized by St. Louis Poetry Center.

Matthias Göritz with translator Mary Jo Bang - ‘Colonies of Paradise: Poems’

The first book of poetry by Matthias Göritz to be available in English, in a translation by a renowned writer.

Very few books of poetry by contemporary German writers are available to English-speaking readers. In Colonies of Paradise, acclaimed poet and translator Mary Jo Bang introduces the poems of novelist, poet and translator Matthias Göritz, one of the most exciting German writers publishing today. The poems in this book, which originally appeared in German under the title Loops, take the reader on a tour of Paris, Chicago, Hamburg and Moscow as they explore childhood, travel and the human experience. Unsettling our expectations about adulthood, the book permeates the quotidian with a disquieting strangeness that leads us deeper into our own lives and histories. Göritz’s sly humor, keen insight and artistry are brought to the fore in Bang’s careful and innovative translation, allowing an English-language audience to enter fully the intricate interiority of Göritz’s work.

MATTHIAS GÖRITZ is a poet, translator, and novelist. He has written four poetry collections, Loops, Pools, Tools and Spools; three novels, including Der kurze Traum des Jakob Voss (The Brief Dream of Jakob Voss) and Parker; and three novellas. He has received the Hamburg Literature Prize, the Mara Cassens Prize, the Robert Gernhardt Prize and the William Gass Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

MARY JO BANG is the author of eight books of poetry — including Elegy: Poems, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award — and the translator of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.