Award-Winning Poet and Author to Speak at Holy Cross

Award-winning poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer Sydney Lea will read from his poetry as part of the Visiting Writers Series at the College of the Holy Cross on Thursday, April 7 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library.  The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.  

Lea has published nine volumes of poetry, including his most recent book, The Young of the Year, which came out from Four Way Books this spring. One of his earlier volumes, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems (1996), was co-winner of the Poets’ Prize. Another book of poems, Pursuit of a Wound (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to his masterful narrative poems and lyrical descriptions of nature, Lea is the author of a novel, A Place in Mind (1989), and two books of nonfiction nature writing, Hunting the Whole Way Home (1994) and A Little Wildness: Some Notes on Rambling (2006).

The founding editor of the New England Review, Lea has edited several anthologies of poems, stories, and essays. He is also active in nature conservation and has been described as “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.”

Lea has taught at universities throughout New England, as well as in Europe, and his writing has been recognized with grants from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller foundations. He is now completing his 10th volume of poetry, I Was Thinking of Beauty.

The 2011 Visiting Writers Series will conclude on Thursday, May 5 with a reading by Robert Cording, poet and professor of English and creative writing at Holy Cross, at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library.