Visiting Writers
Monmouth University’s Center for the Arts Visiting Writers Series brings the most celebrated poets and authors from around the world (Andrei Codrescu, Colm Tóibín, Adam Zagajewski,) and our own back yard (Long Branch’s own US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky) to the beautiful auditorium of the University’s centerpiece, historic Wilson Hall. With our Visiting Writers Series, we hope the audience will experience a renewed sense of their relationship to poetry and fiction, to language, and to be moved emotionally by that writer’s representation of what it means to be a human being, whether that experience is one of joy, celebration, longing, or sorrow. For additional information, please contact the director of the Visiting Writers Series, Michael Thomas at 732-263-5635.
Free and Open to the Public
Upcoming Events:
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Date: 9/19/2013
Location: Wilson Hall
Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and the forthcoming Blood Lyrics (Graywolf
Press, 2014). Ford is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and
the Larry Levis Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of
2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,
and many other journals. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College
and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons,
and their young daughter.
Free and open to the public
Date: 10/16/2013
Location: Wilson Hall
Jan Beatty’s fourth full-length book, The Switching/Yard, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in February, 2013. A limited edition chapbook, Ravage, was published by Lefty Blondie Press in 2012. Other books include Red Sugar, finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize; Boneshaker, finalist, Milton Kessler Award; Mad River, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize—all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her chapbook, Ravenous, won the 1995 State Street Prize.
Free and open to the public
Date: 11/14/2013
Location: Wilson Hall
Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting
(University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux
for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, FIELD, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in At Length, Better, The Southern Review,
and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships in poetry from Yaddo and the
National Endowment for the Arts, and she teaches creative writing in
Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program.
Free and open to the public
Date: 3/25/2014
Location: Pollak Theatre
President Obama's Inaugural Poet,
Richard Blanco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the
United States—meaning his mother, 7 months pregnant, and the rest of
the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born. Only
45 days later, the family emigrated once more and settled in Miami. His
acclaimed first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, explores the
yearnings and negotiation of cultural identity as a Cuban- American, and
received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize. His second book, Directions
to The Beach of the Dead, won the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN
American Center for its continued exploration of the universal themes of
cultural identity and homecoming.
Free and open to the public
Date: 4/24/2014
Location: Pollak Theatre
Louise Glück is one of America’s finest contemporary poets. Winner of
the Pulitzer Prize, Glück is a former Poet Laureate of the United States
and the author of a dozen widely acclaimed books. Stephen Dobyns,
writing in the New York Times Book Review, said “no American poet
writes better than Louise Glück, perhaps none can lead us so deeply
into our own nature.” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass has called her
“one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.”
Free and open to the public
Past Events
