Thursday, May 24, 7pm – Memoir
Charles Cantalupo is author of Joining Africa – From Anthills to Asmara
Charles Cantalupo, author of Joining Africa – From Anthills to Asmara, is Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African Studies at Penn State. His translations include three books of Eritrean poetry, We Have Our Voice and We Invented the Wheel (poems by Reesom Haile) and, with Ghirmai Negash, Who Needs a Story? – Contemporary Eritrean Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic. A monograph, War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry is based on the poetry in Who Needs a Story? His other books include two collections of edited essays on Ngugi wa Thiong’o; two collections of poetry, Anima/l Woman and Other Spirits and Light the Lights; and A Literary Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes’s Masterpiece of Language. With major grants from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and others, Cantalupo co-chaired Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century in Asmara, Eritrea, in January 2000. He is the writer and director of the documentary Against All Odds and a co-author of the historic “Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures.”