Beall Poetry Festival Will Welcome Renowned Contemporary Poets to Campus
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The 18th annual Beall Poetry Festival, a three-day celebration of some of the finest contemporary poetry, will feature four renowned poets. The events, which are free and open to the public, will run Wednesday, March 28, through Friday, March 30, on the Baylor University campus.
Events will include a panel discussion, poetry readings and the Virginia Beall Ball Lecture on Contemporary poetry.
Wednesday
The festival will begin at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday in Room 101 of Carroll Science Building with the 2012 student literary awards. At 7 p.m., poet and translator A.E. Stallings will give a poetry reading in Kayser Auditorium of the Hankamer School of Business.
Stallings is a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and director of the Athens Centre poetry program in Athens, Greece. She has received a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize for Poetry, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award from the Formalist, the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize from Evansville Review.
Her new volume Olives will be released by Northwestern University Press in 2012. Her collection Hapax (2006) won the Poet's Prize in 2008 and her earlier book of poetry Archaic Smile (1999) won the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. She also has translated Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things), which was published in 2007.
Stallings was born in Decatur, Ga., in 1968. She earned her bachelor's degree in classics at the University of Georgia in 1990 her master's degree from the University of Oxford in 1992. Since 1999, she has lived in Athens, Greece.
Thursday
Jay Parini, D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt., will present the Virginia Beall Ball Lecture in Contemporary Poetry at 3:30 p.m. Thursday in Kayser Auditorium. At 7 p.m., Stephen Dunn, distinguished professor emeritus of creative writing at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Galloway Township, N.J., will give a poetry reading in Kayser Auditorium.
A literary critic, poet, novelist and biographer, Parini is the author of Why Poetry Matters (2008) and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America (2008). His collections of poems include The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (2005) and his six novels include The Last Station (1990). Parini also has published a number of other literary criticisms and biographies, as well as a memoir of his teaching career The Art of Teaching (2005).
Parini was born in Pittston, Pa., in 1948. He received his bachelor's degree from Lafayette College in 1970 and his doctoral degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 1975. He is a co-founder of the New England Review and has served as editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and the Norton Book of American Autobiography.
Dunn is a recipient of the James Wright Prize from Mid-American Review, the Levinson and Oscar Blumenthal Prizes from Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His collections of poems include Here and Now: Poems (2011), What Goes On: Selected and New Poems: 1995-2009 (2009) and Everything Else in the World (2006).
Born in Forest Hill, N.Y., in 1939, Dunn received his bachelor's degree in history from Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., in 1962 and his master's degree in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1970. He has taught at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey since 1974.
Friday
At 3:30 p.m. Friday, there will be a panel discussion with the festival's participants in Room 101 of Carroll Science. At 7 p.m., Northern Irish poet Michael Longley will give a poetry reading in Kayser Auditorium.
Longley is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and one of the 250 distinguished artists who are members of Aosdana, an Irish association of artists created in 1981. He is a recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry and the Librex Montale Prize. His collections of poetry include A Hundred Doors (2011), Collected Poems (2006) and Snow Water (2004).
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1939, Longley earned his bachelor's degree from Trinity College, Dublin in 1963. From 1970-1971, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He held the Ieland Chair of Poetry as Ireland's Professor of Poetry from 2007-2010. He also holds honorary doctorates from the Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin.
The Beall Poetry Festival is supported by the John A. and DeLouise McClelland Beall Endowed Fund, established in 1994 by the late Mrs. Virginia B. Ball of Muncie, Ind., to honor her parents and to encourage the writing and appreciation of poetry.
Carroll Science is at 1401 S. Fifth St.
Hankamer School of Business is at 1428 S. Fifth St.
For more information, contact the Baylor department of English at (254) 710-1768.
by Katy McDowall, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805