Arts & Culture

Cris Baldwin, assistant dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is five-term president of Women On Wheels, the nation’s largest female-focused motorcycling organization. She discusses long rides, wayward art students and the best way to jury-rig a busted shock absorber.

The Congressional Medal of Honor is the United States’ highest award for valor in combat. It is very hard to get. Since being signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, only 3,468 medals have been awarded — 70 percent of them posthumously. In Beyond Glory, actor and playwright Stephen Lang — perhaps best known as Colonel Quaritch in Avatar — presents eight of these stories in the words of the men who lived them.

“Over the last decade, J. Robert Lennon’s literary imagination has grown increasingly morbid, convoluted and peculiar,” writes The New York Times Book Review, “just as his books have grown commensurately more surprising, rigorous and fun.” Lennon, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing at Washington University in St. Louis, will host a pair of events Nov. 5 and 7.

At 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, Leach will read from her work as part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. A reception and book signing will immediately follow.

Special Parent’s Weekend concert to feature music of Bach, Haydn, Rachmaninoff, Albeniz, Finzi, Saint-Saëns, Dvořák and more Oct. 26.

With its blunt depictions of adolescent sexuality and startling mixture of contemporary expression and fin de siècle restraint, Spring Awakening—by WUSTL alumnus Steven Sater—is among the most influential, unexpected and beloved Broadway shows of recent years. On Oct. 25, the Performing Arts Department will debut a new production in Edison Theatre.

The Master of Landscape Architecture program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts has received a full, six-year term of accreditation from the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board.

In Green and Gray, his fearlessly experimental second collection, Geoffrey G. O’Brien fashions poetry from neighborhood flyers and political speeches, mixing phrases from Dante, the Patriot Act and Jean Genet. That audacious mingling of personal and political continues to inform People on Sunday, O’Brien’s latest, and most autobiographical, collection. On Oct. 10, O’Brien will read from his work for The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series.

American produce is shipped an average of 1,500 miles before reaching its point of sale. In St. Louis, the 14-acre Magic Chef complex sits empty and unused. Graduate student Haley O’Brien wants to address both problems by growing hydroponic tomatoes on The Hill, an historic Italian-American enclave that boasts some of the finest pasta sauces in the Midwest.

Mongolia is a hard land, a place of extremes, of mountains and deserts, of lost empires and tough survivors. On Oct. 20, the “blood brothers” of AnDa Union will bring the stirring, demanding and infectious Music of Inner Mongolia to St. Louis as part of the Edison Ovations Series.