This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Readings by poets Heather McHugh, Ross Gay ’96, and student winners of two annual Lafayette contests are marking National Poetry Month in April.
In addition, Creative Writing students and members of the Lafayette Poetry Workshop will give a reading at “Something Purple’s Happening” 8:30 p.m. Thursday at Gilbert’s. An open mic will follow.
Sponsored by the English department, the three poetry events are free and open to the public.
Gay, featured judge of the 2004 Jean Corrie Poetry Competition, will read his poetry at an ice cream social 4:10 p.m. today in the Faculty Dining Room of Marquis Hall. He will be preceded at the podium by Corrie winner Veronica Slaght ’07 (Pittstown, N.J.) and honorable mentions Marilyn Holguin ’05 (Grayslake, Ill.), a double major in English and philosophy, and Jesslyn Roebuck ’06 (Montgomery, N.Y.), an international affairs major. An open mic will follow Gay’s reading.
Gay calls Slaght’s poetry “smart and insightful, using comedy as a way to reveal some basic, emotional, human truthsfunny toward an emotional end, serious without being self-absorbed, with a playful and skillful use of language that is fresh, unexpected, and pleasantly jarring.”
The recipient of the George Wharton Pepper Prize, awarded to the Lafayette senior who “most nearly represents the Lafayette ideal,” Gay graduated with a bachelor’s degree, double majoring in English and art. He earned honors in studio art and was a starting defensive end on the varsity football team. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in literature at Temple University and holds a master’s degree in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His poems have appeared in Sulfur, Columbia, American Poetry Review, and Harvard Review, among others publications.
The Jean Corrie Poetry Competition is sponsored by the English department and the Academy of American Poets. The contest is open to Lafayette first-year students, sophomores, and seniors.
McHugh, featured judge of the 2004 MacKnight Black Poetry Competition, read from her works April 23 in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium. She was preceded by Marquis Scholar Creighton Conner ’04 (Lewisburg, Pa.), a double major in English and American studies, who read his winning submissions: “Tulip,” “Week-End” and “Questions are Sunlight Answers the Water.” “Evident in all three poems are a sharp eye for natural patterns and a lively inclination to sensual detail,” says McHugh.“This poet’s flower poem sizzles with sexual implication, and the hand that writes ‘cold.froze the webs of spiders, and the spiders//With them’ is guided by no mere decorative impulse.These poems are winners because of their sass and savvy.”
McHugh’s books of poetry include Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), which won both the Boston Book Review‘s Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a “Notable Book of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review; Shades (1988); To the Quick (1987); A World of Difference (1981); and Dangers (1977). She is also the author of Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and two books of translation: Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (with Niko Boris, 1989) and D’après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981).
Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
She teaches as a core faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is frequently appointed as visiting professor at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa, and has held chairs at University of California at Berkeley, University of Alabama, and University of Cincinnati.
Sponsored by the English department, the MacKnight Black Poetry Competition is open to Lafayette seniors. It is named after MacKnight Black ’16, who at the time of his death in 1931 was one of America’s most significant poets.