Holy Cross Fall 2005 Visiting Writers Series

WORCESTER, Mass. – As part of the College of the Holy Cross Visiting Writers Lecture Series, the following writers will give readings during the 2005 fall semester. All readings are free and open to the public. This series is sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program.

Sept. 15 Major Jackson 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Major Jackson’s debut volume of poems, Leaving Saturn (2001), was selected by poet and novelist Al Young to receive the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, was nominated for a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award and has received critical attention in the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, and on National Public Radio. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, Grand Street and the New Yorker. Formerly the Literary Arts Curator of Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, he is the recipient of awards from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a commission from the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. In 2003, he received the prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont and a member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina. His second book of poems Hoops is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Oct. 13 Gibbons Ruark 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Gibbons Ruark’s poems have appeared widely for nearly 40 years in magazines like Ploughshares, The New Republic, the New Yorker and Poetry, and in various anthologies and texts. They have also won him frequent awards, including three poetry fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Pushcart Prize. He has published six previous volumes of poems, A Program for Survival (1971), Reeds (1978), Keeping Company (1983), Small Rain (1984), Forms of Retrieval (1989), and Rescue the Perishing (1991), and his seventh and most recent book is Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems (1999). X.J. Kennedy says of Passing Through Customs, "you would have to sift through the life’s work of a great many poets to find another hundred pages nearly as fine as these." Edward Hirsch says Ruark is the poetic heir to Edward Thomas and James Wright. Elizabeth Spires writes that Passing Through Customs "reacquaints the reader with what has been too often lost to contemporary poetry - the ceremony and music of the occasion. Ruark is the sage ‘singing master’ that Yeats imagined inhabiting Byzantium." Ruark recently retired from teaching at the University of Delaware.

Nov. 29 Michael White 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Michael White is the author of four novels: A Brother’s Blood (1997), which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers’ Nominee; The Blind Side of the Heart (2001), an Alternate Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and A Dream of Wolves (2002), which received starred reviews from Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly (all from HarperCollins). His latest novel, The Garden of Martyrs (2004), was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2004. A collection of short stories, Marked Men (2000), was published by the University of Missouri Press. He has also published more than 45 short stories in national magazines and has won the Advocate Newspapers Fiction Award. He teaches fiction writing and literature at Fairfield University, and he is on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s MFA program. He is also the editor of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose.