June 28th: Mary Ann Caws and Grace Schulman on Mina Loy

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Mary Ann Caws will discuss her new book Mina Loy: Apology of Genius with Grace Schulman.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, June 28th, at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. If you have questions during the event, please email them to Evan@192Books.com.

Mary Ann Caws — Mina Loy: Apology of Genius (Published by Reaktion Books, Distributed by The University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe and, finally, Aspen, Colorado, where she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist.

This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy’s exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the Swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text.

Grace Schulman’s latest book of poems is The Marble Bed, and her recent memoir is Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been awarded the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, given by the Poetry Society of America. Editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore, she is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, C.U.N.Y.