16th Annual Beall Poetry Festival Features Renowned American Poets

March 23, 2010

Follow us on Twitter: @BaylorUMedia
The 16th annual Beall Poetry Festival, a three-day celebration of some of America's finest contemporary poets, will feature four renowned poets. The event will run Thursday, March 25, through Saturday, March 27, in Armstrong Browning Library and will include a panel discussion, poetry readings and the Virginia Beall Ball Lecture on Contemporary Poetry.
The festival will begin at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 25, with a reading from poet John Koethe.
Koethe's Domes won the Frank O'Hara Award for Poetry, and his Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. He has been granted fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has been nominated for the New Yorker Book Award, the Boston Book Review Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.
Friday's events will begin with the four festival poets--John Koethe, Carol Frost, Charles Altieri and Stanley Plumly--in a panel discussion at 3:30 p.m. At 7 p.m., Frost will present a poetry reading.
Frost is the author of collections of poetry, including Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems, The Queen's Desertion and The Salt Lesson. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and has won several Pushcart Prizes.
She also founded and for 15 years directed the Catskill Poetry Workshop at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York.
At 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, Altieri, professor of poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, will present the Virginia Beal Ball Lecture.
The festival will conclude at 7 p.m. on Saturday with a poetry reading by Stanley Plumly, professor of English and co-director of University of Maryland's creative writing program.
Plumly received his master's degree and doctorate from Ohio University. His first collection of poems, In the Outer Dark, was named the winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. Plumly holds the Distinguished University Professorship at the University of Maryland in College Park.
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. All events are free and open to the public.

Armstrong Browning Library is located at 710 Speight Ave.

For more information, call (254) 710-1768 or visit https://www.baylor.edu/beall/.

by Jessica Puente, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805