The Performing Arts Department will present “Shadows,” a new work by celebrated choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess, as part of “PastForward,” the 2018 Washington University Dance Theatre concert, beginning Nov. 30. In all, the concert will feature more than 20 dancers performing seven works by faculty and visiting choreographers.

Justin Phillip Reed, a 2015 graduate of the MFA Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, has won the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry. The award is generally considered among the world’s most prestigious literary prizes.

“Stan Lee was a man of contradictions,” says comics scholar Peter Coogan, “self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating; a great collaborator and someone who took credit for others’ work; hugely successful except when his endeavors crashed in failure. But unlike the superheroes, neither side was secret.”

Hiro is young and successful in New York, a world away from her old Kentucky home. But when her little sister decides to marry — at age 22, to a born-again Christian she just met — Hiro responds, determined to stop the wedding. Washington University’s Ron Himes will direct “Kentucky” Nov. 15-18 in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.

The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch a new master of fine arts degree in illustration and visual culture in fall 2019. The program — the first of its kind in the Midwest — will combine intensive studio practice with an emphasis on scholarly and theoretical analysis.

The Brooksfields are determined to take a trip. Nothing will stop them — not the blizzard, not the mistress, not even the drug dealers. In “Florida,” Lucas Marschke recounts a dysfunctional family vacation for the ages. This weekend, “Florida” will receive its world-premiere staged reading at Washington University in St. Louis as part of the annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival.

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis welcome Dave Hullfish Bailey as their 2018-19 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow. Designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles, the fellowship consists of two month-long residencies, during which Bailey will lead studios in the Sam Fox School while preparing an exhibition for the museum’s Currents series.

In “The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs,” the Sam Fox School’s Cheryl Wassenaar and Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer explore the ways our distinct inner voices combine to create a “bureaucracy of the mind.”

Paul Tran, a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, is one of five young poets awarded a $25,800 prize from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine.

Kinga Pabjan, project manager for Team WashU at the 2018 Solar Decathlon China, discusses Lotus House, 3D printing and the future of sustainable design.