Irish Poet and Pulitzer Prize Winner Highlight Fourth Annual Beall Poetry Festival

March 19, 1998

Five distinguished poets and poetry critics, including the winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, will participate in Baylor University's fourth annual Beall Poetry Festival scheduled for March 31 - April 2.
The festival program, which coincides with the Academy of American Poets' third annual National Poetry Month in April, will be held in the Meadows Recital Hall of the Glennis McCrary Music Building on the Baylor campus. All events are free and open to the public.
This year's participants are Eavan Boland, a distinguished poet from Ireland; Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Justice; Peter Davison, poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly; Linda Gregerson, a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist; and Cathy Song, the first writer born and raised in Hawaii to achieve national acclaim for her work.
On Tuesday, March 31, Linda Gregerson will open the three-day festival by reading a selection of her poems at 3:30 p.m., to be followed by Donald Justice's poetry reading at 7:30 p.m. On Wednesday, April 1, Cathy Song will give a poetry reading at 3:30 p.m., and Peter Davison will deliver the Virginia Beall Ball Lecture in Contemporary Poetry at 7:30 p.m. On Thursday, April 2, Davison will read his poetry at 3:30 p.m., and Eavan Boland will close the festival with a reading of her poems at 7:30 p.m.
As a special event, Barnes & Noble Booksellers will host a preview of the Beall Poetry Festival from 7-9 p.m. Thursday, March 26, at their Waco store, located at 4909 W. Waco Drive. This free event will include readings of the five participating poets' works by several faculty members and graduate students in Baylor's Department of English.
The Beall Poetry Festival is supported by the John A. and DeLouise McClelland Beall Endowed Fund, which was established in 1994 by Mrs. Virginia B. Ball of Muncie, Ind., to honor her parents and to encourage the writing and appreciation of poetry. Mrs. Ball, a Baylor graduate, is a previous donor to Baylor. She established the Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities in 1982 and, in a separate gift, provided funds for the nationally recognized Academy of American Poets Award, given annually to a Baylor student for an original work.