Author: Liam Otten

Two exhibitions of Bill Kohn’s work are on view at the William & Florence Schmidt Art Center at Southwestern Illinois College in Belleville.

Subsequent speakers include painter T.L. Solien, photographer Phyllis Galembo, graphic designer Michael Mabry and painter Helene Aylon.

An homage to the great Swedish singer Jenny Lind, widely known as “The Swedish Nightengale,” will begin at 8 p.m. Sept. 12.

The staged reading focuses on Margaret, a young Korean-American architecture student who must present her final degree project.

Carl Phillips, professor of English and African & African American Studies, both in Arts & Sciences, has won two prestigious poetry awards — The Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry — for his recent collection The Rest of Love: Poems (2004).

Ken BotnickUnsettled GroundLandscape. The word evokes mountain lakes and desert plains, rivers and trees and fields of green. Yet in present-day America, landscape has become an increasingly complex and divisive issue. Suburban development sprawls ever outward while many traditional urban cores crumble to rust and rubble. Once a nation of cities and farms, we now find ourselves confronting a frequently uneasy mixture of natural and postindustrial environments. On Sept. 19 and 20, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will host a national symposium titled “Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape, and Ecology Now!” Co-sponsored with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, “Unsettled Ground” is the first in a yearlong series of lectures, panel discussions, artistic interventions and workshops exploring the intersection of contemporary architecture, art, ecology and urban design.

St. Louis saxophonist Freddie Washington, a popular mainstay of Gaslight Square clubs in the 1960s, will launch Washington University’s ninth annual Jazz at Holmes series with a performance from 8 to 10 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 15.

Courtesy imageJohn KinsellaAustralian poet John Kinsella will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, for the Writing Program Reading Series at Washington University in St. Louis. The reading is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, located on the second floor of Duncker Hall, in the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Hoyt and Brookings drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Stewart Goldstein”Crossin’ Over”The St. Louis Black Repertory Company will open its 29th season with Crossin’ Over, an all-new musical production chronicling the history of Africans in America, at Edison Theatre Sept. 14-25.

Joe Angeles/WUSTL Photo Services”Private Jokes, Public Places”The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual arts will present a staged reading of Oren Safdie’s Private Jokes, Public Places — a biting academic satire set amidst an architectural design review — at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 12, in the foyer of Givens Hall.