Oct. 16, 1998
Contact: Carol Wood
(804) 924-6189


Music, Poetry, and Memoirs
SYMPOSIUM BLENDS MEDIUMS TO REFLECT ON WAR AND SURVIVAL

	"Violence, Poetry, and Survival," will bring together a
composer, a poet, and a writer to perform and discuss their artistic
responses to this century's sad legacy of violent oppression.
	Scheduled for Thursday Oct. 29, 7 p.m., in Old Cabell Hall, the
symposium, which is part of the Nobel Peace Laureates Conference
Educational Series, features a world-premiere choral composition and a
reading of memoirs and poetry.
	The first event, "Violence, Self, and Survival," features
literary memoirs and poetry by Nora Strejelevich and Gregory Orr.
Strejelevich will read from, "One Death That Is Many" (Una Sola Muerte
Numerosa), her prize-winning memoir of life and death in and survival
after the concentration camps of Argentina's "dirty war." Orr will read
from his just completed memoir,
"Cain Continuing," a poet's remembrance of surviving the violences of
every life every day.
	The second event, "Songs of War and Peace," features a world
premiere choral composition by Judith Shatin, performed by the Virginia
Consort and conducted by Judith Gary.  The setting of the composition is
the new poetry collection, "After the First Rain: Israeli Poems of War
and Peace," collected by Moshe Dor and Barbara Goldberg and dedicated to
the memory of Yitzhak Rabin. Goldberg, along with translator Merrill
Leffler, will read four of the poems.
	The event will close with refreshments and a panel discussion
led by the performers.
A note about the performers:
* Judith Shatin is an internationally performed composer, who has been
honored with four National Endowment for the Arts Composer Awards.  Her
music has been described as "bursting with imaginative detail" by the
San Francisco Chronicle. She is a professor of music at U.Va.

* Gregory Orr has published six collections of poetry, most recently
"City of Salt."  He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two
National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Orr is poetry editor of the
Virginia Quarterly Review and professor of English at U.Va.


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* Nora Strejilevich is the director of IASN -- International Archive of
Survivor Narratives -- devoted to recording testimonies from survivors
of violent political oppression. As a writer, she has received several
awards for her memoirs and documentary fiction (from the Universities of
Alberta, York, and Miami). The last award, letras de oro, was granted
for her book "One Death Among Many," which will be published in
translation by The University Press of Virginia.

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	For more information on the symposium, you can contact Peter
Ochs, professor of religious studies, at (804) 924-6718.

Television reporters should contact the TV News Office at (804)
924-7550.