Use the words you have to get the words you need

Date & Time: Tuesday 20 May 2025, 5pm–7pm

Location: The Bowland Auditorium, Berrick Saul Building, Campus West, University of York & Online

Admission: Free, but booking is required → Book Tickets

Photo credit: Olivia Braggs

Use the words you have to get the words you need

Susan Stanford Friedman Keynote Performance-Lecture

With this poetic invitation, the University of York welcomes Professor Kimberly Campanello for the Susan Stanford Friedman Keynote Performance-Lecture — a powerful and evocative exploration of language, feeling, and form.

Join us on Tuesday 20 May for an evening that promises not just a talk, but a transformative experience. Campanello, Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds and an internationally celebrated writer, invites us into a space where words are not simply spoken but felt, passed, resurrected.

This performance-lecture will experiment with language as a living, moving force — an “unmapping” of land and memory, a choreography of phrases that dignify, open, and ask. With fragments that brush against Gertrude Stein, Dante, Lorca, and beyond, Campanello’s piece traverses poetic terrain that is urgent, raw, and beautiful. It’s a space where a sentence becomes a gesture, and a wound becomes a bridge. Where syntax isn’t a cage, but a key.

“A word is a seed. It’s not like one. We know this is true when we tend one, and we know it even more when we don’t.”

This lecture is part of the EUTERPE series honoring feminist scholar and theorist Susan Stanford Friedman. A wine reception will follow the event.

About the SpeakerKimberly Campanello is the author of An Interesting Detail (Bloomsbury Poetry) and Use the Words You Have (Somesuch Editions), the debut novel from the BAFTA- and Oscar-winning production company’s literary imprint. Her work spans poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms, with recent pieces appearing in Poetry Ireland Review, Still Point, and Notre Dame Review. Her current project, This Knot, reimagines Dante’s Commedia in radical and resonant new ways.

For more on Kimberly’s work, visit: www.kimberlycampanello.com