Award-winning poet Ryan Wilson, originally scheduled to speak Jan. 31 at the University of Tennessee at Martin, will now appear April 25 after severe weather prevented travel for the original engagement. His presentation on “The Poetry of Remembrance” will begin at 7:30 p.m., April 25, in the Paul Meek Library as part of the 2019 Meek Literacy Legacy Program. Wilson is returning to campus after being featured at the Southern Literary Festival in April 2018.
The presentation will focus on the development of poetic language and imagination as well as the language of Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Wilson is the author of “The Stranger World,” a collection of poems that won the 2017 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. The book will be available for purchase and signing during the event.
Wilson is also editor of Literary Matters, an online journal for literary criticisms, translations, poetry and interviews. Through the journal, he has published works by several U.S. Poets Laureate and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bollingen Prize. His own poems have been published in platforms such as Best American Poetry 2018, Five Points, the Hopkins Review, the New Criterion, the Sewanee Review and the Yale Review. Wilson has also published multiple critical essays, which have received awards such as the Jacques Maritain Prize, the Eleanor Clark Award and the Sewanee Review’s Walter Sullivan Prize.
Wilson works as an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the Western State Colorado University graduate program. He also serves as the office administrator and chief financial officer of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, a non-profit organization that supports the study of literature in academic and creative environments. He holds degrees from the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and Boston University.
For more information about the speaker, contact Mary Ann Rea, Paul Meek Library, at 731-881-7075.
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