University
of St. Francis
Undergraduate Conference on
English Language and Literature
Featured Speakers
Martin Espada was
born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published thirteen
books in all as a poet, editor and translator. His eighth book of poems is
called The
Republic of Poetry, just released by W.W. Norton. His last collection, Alabanza: New and
Selected Poems (1982-2002), was published by
Norton in 2003, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement,
and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the year. An
earlier book, Imagine the Angels of
Bread (Norton,
1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include A Mayan
Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of
Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is
the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received
numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley
Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent
Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding
Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Charity Randall Citation, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships. Most recently,
he received a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His
poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New
York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, and The Best American
Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s
Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like
Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone,
1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University
of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of
poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog,
2004). A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor
in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where
he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.
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Eavan Boland is
acknowledged as the preeminent woman poet of Ireland; she is one of the most
formidable contemporary poets as well as one of the most provocative thinkers
about poetry as women write it. The author of eight volumes of poetry, among
them An
Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 and In a Time of
Violence (1994), Boland also published a 1995 memoir, Object Lessons: The Life of a Woman Poet in Our Time. Boland’s
most recent work, The Lost Land, combines Irish postcolonial experience and
Irish politics with an outspoken feminism.
Boland has
received many honors and awards, including the Lannan
Foundation Award in Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. She is
a professor of English at Stanford
University, where she
also directs the Creative Writing Program. When not in residence at Stanford, she
lives in Dublin
with her husband and two daughters.
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Award-winning
poet Marilyn Nelson is author of The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems, The Homeplace and Mama’s Promises along with two
collections of verse for children: The Cat Walked
through the Casserole and Other Poems for Children and Halfdan Rasmussen’s
Hundreds of Hens and Other Poems for Children, which she translated from Danish.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio,
Nelson started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her B.A.
from the University of California, Davis, and
holds an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania along with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her honors include two
Pushcart Prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship and the 1990 Connecticut Arts
Award. Since 1978 she has taught at the University
of Connecticut, Storrs, where she is a professor of English.
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Acclaimed novelist Valerie Martin is the featured speaker at the 13th Annual
Undergraduate Conference on English Language and Literature, March 19-20 at the
University
of St. Francis
in Joliet.
Martin's
works include the novels Property,
Mary Reilly, The Great Divorce and Italian Fever, along with biography Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis.
Martin is the winner of Britain's
famed Orange Prize for Fiction for Property
(2003), which is set against a backdrop of slavery in the South. The book is
acclaimed by author Toni Morrison as "fresh," the writing "a
marvel." Salvation: Scenes
from the Life of St. Francis offers readers an intriguing,
unorthodox biography of one of Christianity's most celebrated figures. The
biography opens as St. Francis is dying and then travels roughly backward in
time to depict his life in scenes inspired by panels of Italian frescoes.
Martin is also a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. She
presently serves on the graduate writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.
A native of New Orleans,
Martin lives in upstate New
York.
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Phillip Lopate is the author of three essay collections, Bachelorhood (1981), Against Joie de Vivre (1989), and Portrait of My Body (1996); two novels,
Confessions of Summer (1979)
and The Rug Merchant (1987);
two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't
Always Want to Stay Open (1972) and The Daily Round (1976); and a memoir of his teaching
experiences, Being With Children (1975).
He has edited two anthologies: Journal
of a Living Experiment (1979), and The Art of the Personal Essay (1994, short excerpt of
introduction). He writes regularly for a variety of magazines and literary
journals on topics ranging from movies to architecture and urban form to travel.He has worked with children for many years as a writer-in-the-schools and has taught creative writing
and literature to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Houston, Bennington College, and Columbia University.
His works have appeared in Best American
Essays, The Paris Review,
Pushcart Prize Annuals, and many other publications. A recipient of Guggenheim
and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, he lives in Brooklyn New York, and is Adams Professor of the
Humanities at Hofstra University.
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Robert
Creeley has deeply influenced contemporary
American poetry. His first book, Le Fou appeared in 1952 and hardly a year has
since passed without a new work. For
Love, Pieces, Windows and Selected Poems are among his many
collections. His work includes the novel
The Island and a collection of stories, The Gold Diggers. Internationally acclaimed as a poet, Creeley is the 1999 winner of the coveted Bollingen Prize in Poetry (Yale University Library), given
to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years
or for a lifetime achievement in poetry.
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Li-Young
Lee will be the featured speaker at the College of St. Francis Sixth Annual
Undergraduate Conference on English Language and Literature, Saturday, March
22, 1997.Rose, Lee's first
book of poems (BOA Editions Ltd., 1986) was awarded New York University's
Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. The City in Which I Love You, his
second collection, was The Academy of Poets'
Lamont Poetry Selection of 1990.Lee is the 1995 recipient of the National
Endowment of the Arts poetry fellowship.
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