Queer Pasts Nourish Queer Futures, April 14, 2021

The 2021 Enid Mark Lecture features Brooke Sylvia Palmieri on the queerness of printed media. Watch the 2021 Enid Mark Lecture on YouTube.

Printed media has always been queer: queer in the 16th-century sense of strange--a strange, aberrant technology--a way of creating and circulating knowledge that worked counter to the norms of its time, and produced further arenas for non-normative, heretical, viral and downright dangerous ideas to circulate. This lecture will explore the queerness of printed media as it dates back to the early modern period, joining the distant past with the more recent 20th- and 21st-century explosion in media related to the LGBTQIA+ liberation movement.

This event will be held on Zoom on Wednesday, April 14 2021 from 3-4:30 p.m.

Brooke Sylvia Palmieri is a writer, printer, and bookseller. After completing a PhD in History at University College London in 2017—“Compelling Reading: The Circulation of Quaker Texts, 1650-1700”—Brooke founded Camp Books in 2018, a traveling rare bookshop and imprint focusing on LGBTQIA+ history and its allied social movements. Since 2015 Brooke has edited Printing History, the journal of the American Printing History Association, and beginning in 2016 has served as a member of the faculty at London Rare Book School, teaching "The Queer Book.” Finally, Brooke is a studio member at the London Centre for Book Arts, where Camp Books’ printed matter is made. For more information see:  https://londonbookarts.org/en-us

About the Annual Enid Mark Lecture

The annual Enid Mark Lecture on Poetry & Contemporary Book Arts is in honor of the memory of artist, writer, and fine book publisher Enid Mark, class of 1954.

Enid Mark ‘54 was passionate about words and imagery. From the 1980s until shortly before her death in 2008, Enid carefully considered all components of her books: text (her own words or those written by others, many of them modern women poets); imagery (her own artwork); type design and layout; binding. In creating her books she collaborated with a small group of New England artists, including bookbinders Barbara Blumenthal and Sarah Creighton, and printers Dan Keleher and Art Larson. Timothy Sheesley printed the illustrations in most of her books.

Enid attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, then studied English literature and studio art at Smith College. She pursued painting and printmaking in the early years of her career and came to favor the technique of photolithography. In 1986, she founded the ELM Press. Her work is included in more than 100 private and public collections in the United States, Canada, England, and Israel. Enid received a 2006 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in recognition for her work in book arts. Among her other honors are a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Leeway Foundation Award for Achievement. In 2004, her book The Elements was awarded the 9th Biennial Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design from the University of Texas/El Paso.

Contact

Nichole Calero
ncalero@smith.edu