The Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series

Thanks to the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks endowment, Westminster College presents its fifteenth annual poetry reading series in 2002-2003. This year's series is also funded by a grant from Salt Lake County through its Zoo, Arts, and Parks funding program. For more information, please call Dr. Natasha Saje, Associate Professor of English and director of the series, at (801) 832-2376, or e-mail nsaje@westminstercollege.edu. Please note that readings begin at 7:00 p.m.

Thursday, September 12

Jewett Center for the Performing Arts Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

Andrei Codrescu

Born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946, Andrei Codrescu emigrated to the United States in 1966 and became a U.S. citizen in 1981. He is the author of many books of poetry, novels, and essays, including most recently the book of poems, Alien Candor (Black Sparrow, 1996) and the novel Casanova in Bohemia (Free Press, 2002). Codrescu is also a columnist on National Public Radio and edits Exquisite Corpse, a literary journal online at www.corpse.org. He is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His awards include a Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar; the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for Excellence in Travel Journalism; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for poetry, for editing, and for radio; and the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award. A man of letters for the new
millennium, Codrescu's work is often funny and always thought provoking.

Andrei Codrescu will also be giving a keynote talk at the Great Salt Lake Book Festival on the Westminster campus Saturday, September 14 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available through the Utah Humanities Council.

Saturday, September 14
10 a.m.-4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.

Sunday, September 15
Noon-5:00 p.m.

Great Salt Lake Book Festival

Westminster College is proud to be the site for the fifth annual Great Salt Lake Book Festival. Presented by the Utah Humanities Council, the Festival brings over 40 writers to Salt Lake City to discuss their work, meet participants, and sign books. Artists from the Book Arts Program at the J. Willard Marriott Library will demonstrate bookbinding, papermaking, and letterpress printing, as well as offer bookmaking workshops for adults and children, and a Children's Book Hospital for overloved books. Festival highlights include Jimmy Santiago Baca, Greg Child, Teresa Jordan, Katie Lee, Laura Numeroff, Thomas Perry, Rick Ridgeway, Allen Say, Mary Sojourner, Mark Spragg, and Jonathan Waterman. This year's festival celebrates the United Nations' "International Year of Mountains" by featuring many nationally acclaimed writers about mountains and rivers. For more information, call the Utah Humanities Council at (801) 359-9670 or visit www.utahhumanities.org.

Thursday, October 17

Jewett Center for the Performing Arts Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936. Her many books of poetry include her first, Good Times, which was published in 1969 and named one of the year's ten most notable books by The New York Times, and most recently, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award. Her widely loved poems are distinguished by plain language and powerful emotions. She is also the author of Generations: A Memoir (1976) and 20 books for children. Her
honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Clifton has served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Thursday November 14

Jewett Center for the Performing Arts Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

Robin Becker

Robin Becker was born in 1951 in Philadelphia and educated at Boston University. Her most recent of five books is The Horse Fair (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); her previous book, All-American Girl, won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. Her honors include the 1997 Virginia Faulkner Prize for Excellence in Writing from Prairie Schooner magazine and fellowships from the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Becker serves as poetry editor for the Women's Review of Books and is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Reviewer J. C. Todd writes in Frigatezine (www.frigatezine.com) that, "Despite its evocative imagery, exciting use of received and nonce forms, and multi-voiced range of dictions drawn from many sources there is remarkable economy and balance in the shape of The Horse Fair."

Thursday February 6

Nunemaker Place, 7:00 p.m.

Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Maurice Kilwein Guevara was born in Belencito, Colombia, in 1961 and raised in Pittsburgh. He is the author of three books of poems-Postmortem (Georgia, 1994), Poems of the River Spirit (Pittsburgh, 1996), and Autobiography of a So-and-So: Poems in Prose (New Issues, 2001)-as well as of plays and works of fiction. Guevara is a professor of English at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Booklist says of his work that "his images are exact and true, his language is raw yet utterly polished. Furthermore, the word 'multicultural' might have been coined for this poet, who alludes to Dante as casually as he deploys Spanish slang." Poet William Olsen describes Guevara's newest book as containing "a troubling beauty that gets at the difficult news with perpetual newness and hope."

Thursday March 6

Nunemaker Place, 7:00 p.m.

Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, New York, in 1954. He is the author of six books of poetry including, most recently, the National Book Award finalist, Brutal Imagination, a dramatic monologue by the perpetrator conjured by Susan Smith to cover her crime of drowning her children.With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is co-founder of Cave Canem, a summer workshop/retreat for African-American poets. He is also a playwright and the recipient of a TCG/Pew playwriting fellowship. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Traveling Scholarship to Tougaloo College in Mississippi, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy. He has taught at many colleges and universities including SUNY Stony Brook, where he also directed its poetry center. "Eady's joy in language engenders our trust in the music that his art has made of love and pain," says Publishers Weekly.

Thursday April 10

Nunemaker Place, 7:00 p.m.

Elaine Terranova and Anne Caston

Elaine Terranova was born in New York City and lives in Philadelphia. She is the author of The Cult of the Right Hand (Doubleday, 1991), which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; Damages (Copper Canyon, 1996); and most recently, The Dog's Heart (Orchises, 2002). Poet Edward Hirsch writes that Terranova "identifies those times when something goes wrong, when things break down, and she illuminates them with a warmly sympathetic imagination[it] flashes with moments and flares with memories [and] burns with a steady light." Terranova's honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and first prize in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg competition. Her translation of Iphigenia at Aulis is included in the Euripides III volume of the Penn Greek Drama Series (1998).

One of five children in a working-class family, Anne Caston was born in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and grew up in the Deep South. Her first collection of poems, Flying Out with the Wounded, won the 1996 New York University Press Prize for Poetry. Kirkus Review called these poems "stark and moving" in their "consider[ation of] the nature of death, suffering, brutality, friendship, love, and longing." Caston's awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship in Poetry at George Washington University, and the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently on leave from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where she serves as assistant professor of creative writing, Caston is spending the year at home in Tooele, Utah.