Read Along with Berkeley English

Connect to the Berkeley English Classroom, and to Each Other

If you are like many graduates of Berkeley’s English Department, your seminars count among your most vivid memories. We’d like to share that experience with you again by inviting you to read along on our upcoming Spring 2025 series with poet and Professor Geoffrey G. O'Brien! Every semester, we provide selected readings and discussion questions, along with an invitation to join an ongoing online discussion and a monthly Open Office Hours with the professor. Join us for three sessions this coming Spring 2025 semester, and Zoom along with Professor O'Brien for our monthly office hours. All sessions are from 6-7 PM PT on Zoom. If you're a Berkeley English alum and want to receive regular updates and Zoom links to join us, sign up for our mailing list! Or join our Facebook group here, where you can participate in casual group discussions and rewatch old Read Along with Berkeley English sessions!

You’ve given so much of yourselves to Berkeley; we now want to bring Berkeley back to you.

Spring 2025 Seminar

American Poetry

This upcoming Spring 2025 semester, we'll be reading along with poet and Professor Geoffrey G. O'Brien's American Poetry. We're excited for the three upcoming sessions! Further details on meeting dates are below. As Professor O'Brien's course description tells us, "This survey of U.S. poetries will begin with 17th- and 18th-century poems by two women, Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, move to another (19th-century) pairing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and then touch down in expatriate and stateside modernisms, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Language Poetry, on our way to the contemporary. Rather than cover all major figures briefly, we'll spend extended time with the work of a few: poets considered will include Paul Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, and Layli Longsoldier. Along the way we'll consider renovations and dissipations of conventional form and meter, the task and materials of the long poem, seriality, citationality, who and what counts as a poetic subject, and how U.S. poetries have imagined community over and against their actual Americas." 

Geoffrey G. O’Brien was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He is the author of five poetry collections: Experience in Groups (2018), People on Sunday (2013), Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002). His work is part of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien (2012), and he collaborated with poet Jeff Clark on 2A (2006). In addition to his teaching for UC Berkeley English, he volunteer-teaches at Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin State Prison.
Schedule for Read Along with Berkeley English - full text description found below image in semester description

Spring 2025 Sessions

Thursday, 2/27, 6 PM PT, Zoom - Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" 

Tuesday, 3/18, 6 PM PT, Zoom - Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, "Objects"

Tuesday, 4/8, 6 PM PT, Zoom - Layli Long Soldier, "38" 

How to "Read Along"

How do I join?

Simply join the Facebook group. If you don't have a Facebook account, join our mailing list here and receive regular updates, reminders, and Zoom links for our sessions.

Who can participate?

The program is open to all.

Does it cost anything?

Participation is free, but we always welcome donations to the English Department Fund in any amount. Just click here.

Can I take as many seminars as I want?

Currently, we run 1 seminar per semester. 

What is the workload?

The workload will vary across courses and sessions. Some sessions may require just the reading of one or two short stories or the viewing of a film. Other sessions might ask for the reading of a complete novel. In general, the professors will aim to keep the workload to a reasonable number of pages.

How often do we meet?

Facebook discussion threads are ongoing, but we will host one live Open Office Hours event per month.

Will I meet the professor?

Yes, the professor will engage participants during the hour-long live Open Office Hours event once a month.

Give to English

Your donation allows us to keep up the programs and services that enrich our students’ experience of literature and extend it beyond the formal classroom setting. For example, money from donors like you allows us to build the collection of books in our department library, to bring poets and other writers to campus for readings, to sponsor lectures by visiting scholars, to help fund graduate-student travel to conferences, libraries, and archives. Your support also allows the English Undergraduate and Graduate Associations to maintain their activities, in which faculty and students share their interests outside of the classroom in informal conversations, and it gives us the opportunity to provide new technologies for writing, research, and collegial collaboration. If you wish to contribute for general departmental use, please give by clicking the link to the English Department Fund found below.

English Department Fund

Support Fund