Holy Cross Fall 2004 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 2004 fall semester. All readings are free and open to the public. This series is sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program.

Tuesday, September 28 Steven Cramer 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Steven Cramer is the author of four poetry collections: The Eye That Desires to Look Upward (1987); The World Book (1992); Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (l997) and the recently released Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande, 2004). His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review and Poetry. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, Tufts, and M.I.T. He currently directs the low-residency program in creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thursday, October 28 Edward Hirsch 8 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Edward Hirsch has published six collections of poetry including For the Sleepwalkers (1981); Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Night Parade (1989); Earthly Measures (l994); On Love (l998) and Lay Back the Darkness (2003). He has also written three prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national best seller, and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for 17 years, he is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Thursday, November 11 Michael Collier 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Michael Collier is the author of four poetry collections: The Clasp and Other Poems (l986); The Folded Heart (l989); The Neighbor (l995); and The Ledge (2000), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In addition, he has edited three anthologies, The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of Contemporary American Poetry; the New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Recipient of Pushcart Prizes, a Thomas J. Watson traveling fellowship, two National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Collier teaches at the University of Maryland and is Poet Laureate of Maryland. Since l995, he has also served as the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Tuesday, November 30 Eamon Grennan 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Eamon Grennan, a Dublin native who has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, is the author of Wildly for Days (1983); What Light There Is (1987); As If It Matters (1992); So It Goes (1995); Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998); Selected and New Poems (2000) and Still Life With Waterfall (2002), which was the winner of the Lenore Marshall Award. His Leopardi: Selected Poems won the PEN Award for poetry in translation. Grennan has also published a collection of critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century. In addition to receiving a number of Pushcart Prizes, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He recently retired from Vassar College where he was the Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Professor of English.