Nouveau Lingo: A Festival of Poets' Theater

Wed, April 22, 2026 7:00 PM - Thu, April 23, 2026 9:00 PM at RCAH Theater, Snyder-Phillips Hall, 361 Physics Rd., East Lansing, MI

This two-night festival of Poets' Theater includes the performance of nine plays written and performed by students in Toby Altman's RCAH 335 class, and a ROIAL Players debut production of Killanova, a new play by Joyelle McSweeney.

Both performances begin at 7:00 p.m. in the RCAH Theater, in the terrace level of Snyder-Phillips Hall.

 

Details:

Wednesday, April 22: Nine plays written and performed by Toby Altman's RCAH 335 class. 

Thursday, April 23: The debut of Joyelle McSweeney's Killanova, performed by the ROIAL Players. A conversation with the student playwrights of RCAH 335 and McSweeney will follow the performance, and a reception and book signing will be held in the LookOut Gallery immediately following.

 

Joyelle McSweeney is a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, a well-regarded critic, an advocate for international literature and translation, and an avid performer who has performed in Tokyo, Stockholm, Seoul, Berlin, Bucharest, Cologne, and all over the US. McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, plays and prose. Her latest book, Death Styles, appeared from Nightboat Books in Spring 2024; her previous title, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her other books include the essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults and the verse play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, which inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists in 2014. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where she chairs the Department of English. In her writing, performance and advocacy, McSweeney strives to be, in the words of her hero, Alice Notley, "a charmed and desperate poet speaking to everyone."