To Smith College Lecturer Adrián Gras-Velázquez, poetry is like a nutella sandwich. From its addictive nature to the feeling of his childhood, Adrián sees poetics as just as sweet. His debut poetry collection, “Lo que hago en mi habitación,” brings his writing to the forefront.
Posts published in “Arts and Culture”
Radical bookstores are that important. Not just in theory, not just on paper, but in how we materially change the world. Bookends, the lesbian marxist bookstore in Florence, dauntingly takes on the task of running a bookstore aligned with its values, pushing against the imagined lesbian history of Northampton and working tirelessly to revive the real one.
Self-described “witchy feminist rockstar” Maggie Rogers is hitting the road again.
I discovered Rogers by chance in early 2019, shortly after her first studio album, “Heard It in a Past Life” came out. Since then, Rogers has released two albums, “Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011–2016” (2020) and “Surrender” (2022). During this time, I have grappled with simultaneously wanting to gate-keep Roger’s musical genius and impose it on all of my family, friends and acquaintances. Despite my greatest efforts, I have been unable to keep Maggie Rogers to myself.
About a year ago, I discovered “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love” (1995), a beautiful independent romance film written and directed by a fellow Smithie, Maria Maggenti ’86 which tells the story of how two teenage girls fall in love with each other.
Smith College Department of Theatre performed “You on the Moors Now,” a play by Jaclyn Brackhaus from Feb. 28–Mar. 2. The experience was a whirlwind, satirical, hyper-feminist fanfiction...
Just dance. Please don’t stop the music. The whole club was looking at her. Tonight’s going to be a good night. 15 years ago, pop music was concentrated on the elation of dancing, drinking and desire in the club. Now, Shygirl is part of a wave of artists bringing it back with her new EP, “Club Shy,” a delightfully crafted collection of songs that revel in their danceability.
In under 100 pages, Anne Harding Woodworth (’65) dives into a conversation on gender fluidity. By looking to a mysterious past and future, in “Gender: Two Novellas in Verse,” she explores secondary universal themes of parenting, companionship and survivorship. Harding Woodworth brings genderfluid people to the forefront of her narrative, starting a conversation on representation and whose stories are worth telling.
Last week I set out on an expedition to find and read a Colleen Hoover book.
I’m an English major and, more relevantly, a lifelong literary elitist. Pretentious books have been the pillars of my superiority complex since grade school, as I peered disdainfully at my classmates’ beyblade battles over my copy of “Beowulf” and once told my seventh-grade teacher that I found “Great Expectations” just so much more rewarding when reading it for the third time.
“The Holdovers” relishes in the powers of its actors, its dialogue and its setting. The film takes an angry kid, a washed up academic and…
Annie Rauwerda is a 24-year-old comedian who had never been to western Massachusetts. But, she certainly knows a lot about it. She’s read up on…