COLORADO SPRINGS - Colorado College is rolling out the red carpet as nine distinguished writers, all with widely differing aesthetics, come to campus for the first year of the Visiting Writers Series.
David Mason, a 1978 Colorado College graduate and a practicing poet, returned to CC last year as a full-time English professor. "When I came here, I wanted to start a series for writers who were already famous, and writers who are just now establishing their reputations," he says.
"The series essentially formalizes what we've been doing at CC for years," English Professor Jane Hilberry comments. "Colorado College has a long tradition of bringing first-rate writers to campus. In recent years, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, John Updike, Sandra Cisneros, Carolyn See, and dozens of others have all visited campus."
With the help of a small faculty committee, including Hilberry and professors from the religion, philosophy and classics departments, Mason has been able to make use of college funds and various endowed lectures. The series is supported by the Office of the Dean, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Maytag Foundation.
Mary Jo Salter, one of the country's best young poets, will read from her most recent book of poetry, A Kiss in Space, on Thursday, October 14. The author of four collections of poems, including Unfinished Painting (the 1989 winner of the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets), she has also published a children's book, The Moon Comes Home. Salter is the recipient of the Amy Lowell Popery Travelling Scholarship, and is an editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Poet Richard Wilbur wrote, "For all her modesty of tone, [Salter] has a range of awareness and response which, in a time when much poetry has shrunk to the merely personal, is refreshingly large."
Schulamith Halevy, an Israeli poet whose highly acclaimed work has appeared in Israel, the U.S. and Mexico, will read from her work on Tuesday, October 19. A revolutionary in the field of African-American poetry, Toi Derricotte will share some of her collection on Wednesday, November 10. Co-founder of Cave Canem, a workshop for African-American writers, Toi Derricotte has written several books of poems, including Natural Birth, Captivity, and her most recent collection, Tender. Her memoir, The Black Notebook, was published in 1997.
Jane Hamilton will visit the CC campus on Wednesday, March 1. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. Describing the writing as "passionate and adroit," The Washington Post Book World observes that Hamilton's book "asks one of literature's biggest questions: what is the meaning of human suffering?" Since then, she has earned more accolades for The Map of the World and The Short History of a Prince.
Jim Harrison, poet, filmwriter, novelist, and one of the most highly-regarded American writers today will close the series. His books include The Woman Lit By Fireflies, Dalva, Julip, Legends of the Fall and The Shape of the Journey: Collected and New Poems. Harrison has been designated to receive the "Spirit of the West Award" from the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association.
The Visiting Writer series has already brought some magnificent authors to our side of the Rocky Mountains. James Welch, novelist, poet, and CC visiting professor, Wendy Cope, one of the best known contemporary poets in England, who is often compared to America's Dorothy Parker, and Timothy Murphy, corporate farmer and businessman, visited campus the first month of classes.
Adrienne Rich, one of the most well-known American poets and activists, read to a full house in late September. Rich, whose poetry is standard material in English and women's studies courses across the country, has not stopped writing since she won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951. She is the author of more than 15 volumes of poetry and four books of non-fiction prose.
Part of the classroom experience, the series gives student writers the opportunity to meet and study with accomplished authors. "I wanted the faculty to build these readings into their classes," Mason says. "This offers [students] another way of connecting with literature. Performance is one of the keys to literature itself; the spoken voice is what trains the written voice to a very great extent."
For more information on the Colorado College Visiting Writers Series, call Diana Smith, media relations assistant, at 719-389-6138, or [email protected], or visit the Web site, http://www.ColoradoCollege.edu/Dept/EN/Events/.
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