Author: Liam Otten

It is a harrowing prologue. Teenagers Brooke and Alex, high school sweethearts, panicked by an accidental pregnancy, rent a hotel room to deliver their stillborn child. So opens The Lost Daughter, the sixth and most recent novel by St. Louis native Lucy Ferriss. On Tuesday, March 6, Ferriss, writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, will read from her work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Cosima Wagner awoke to the sound of music. Her husband, the composer Richard Wagner, had risen early and arranged a 15-piece orchestra on the stairs outside their bedroom. It was the first performance of his Siegfried Idyll, a birthday gift composed for Cosima and titled for their infant son. On Feb. 24, the Washington University Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ward Stare will perform the Siegfried Idyll, along with Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2, in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

Peter Gizzi’s poetry practically vibrates with tensions — between the lyrical and the abstract, joy and grief, interior and exterior. In Threshold Songs, his fifth and most recent collection, the writer is at once elegiac and experimental, building poems and shaping meanings from the rhythms and collisions of words and language even as he mourns a string of personal losses. On Thursday, Feb. 23, Gizzi, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Poetry, will read from his work as part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series.

Dance students in the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences get things moving Feb. 6 as part of an advanced master class led by acclaimed improvisational dancer Kirstie Simson. Described as “a force of nature,” by The New York Times, Simson was on campus as the PAD’s 2012 Marcus Residency Dance Artist.

Herbie Hancock is arguably the most influential jazz pianist of the last 50 years. At 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, Washington University’s Jazz at Holmes series will pay tribute to Hancock with an evening of his music performed by St. Louis’ own Ptah Williams. Now in its 13th year, the series will present free concerts by local and nationally known jazz musicians most Thursday nights throughout the spring.

“Maria.” In Latin cultures, it is the iconic female name — embracing sacred and profane, encompassing women from Maria Magdalena to the Virgin Maria to the romantic lead in West Side Story. It is also the inspiration for Mad’moiselle, a richly theatrical, and frequently tongue-in-cheek, examination of the Marias in all our lives. Next month, Ballet Hispanico, the nation’s preeminent Latino dance organization, will present Mad’moiselle and other recent works as part of the Edison Ovations Series.

War. Terrorism. International expansion. President William McKinley is frequently overshadowed by his charismatic successor, Theodore Roosevelt, yet McKinley’s presidency was arguably the more action-packed, with lasting implications for American power and its role in the world. So argues Scott Miller, author of The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (2011). At 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 20, Miller will discuss McKinley and his legacy for the Center for the Humanities’s third annual Presidents’ Day Lecture.

Three musicians from the St. Louis Symphony will join baritone Keith Boyer, a master’s candidate in vocal performance, and pianist Amanda Kirkpatrick, teacher of applied music in Arts & Sciences, for a free performance Feb. 21. Sponsored by the Department of Music and the symphony’s Community Partnership Program, the concert will feature music of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt.

Do you understand what the IT guy is talking about? Really? Neither do The Water Coolers. Like a Seinfeld episode set to music, or a Dilbert cartoon sprung to life, this New York-based sketch comedy troupe both celebrates and eviscerates modern corporate culture in all its fast-talking, slow-moving absurdity.

Scaphocephalus. The word refers to a condition in which the shape of the skull is markedly long and narrow. At the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, the word is tattooed onto a 19th-century exemplar, neat cursive script fading into aged bone. Over the past several years, Patricia Olynyk, director of the Graduate School of Art, has both detailed and interrogated the Mutter exhibits through a series of large lightbox photographs.