Events

March 2, 2016 at 3:00 pm

Lit Fest April 6-8 | Poet Ellen Bryant Voigt

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Ellen Bryant Voigt

The 2016 Spring Literary Festival welcomes poet Ellen Bryant Voigt.

The festival is April 6-8. All readings and lectures are free and open to the public. The five visiting writers will be present throughout the festival, lecturing and reading from their work, and books by the authors will be available for purchase after each program, and at Little Professor Book Center. Lit Fest is sponsored by the Creative Writing program in the English Department at Ohio University, in conjunction with Alden Library.

Thursday, April 7

11 a.m., Ellen Bryant Voigt lecture (in Baker Ballroom)

Friday, April 8

8:30 p.m., Ellen Bryan Voigt reading (in Baker Ballroom)

About Ellen Bryant Voigt

Bryant Voigt’s poems often traverse the worlds of motherhood, the rural South, family, and music. Poet Edward Hirsch wrote of her early book, Claiming Kin (1976), that Bryant Voigt’s work demonstrates “a Southerner’s devotion to family and a naturalist’s devotion to the physical world.” Her collection Kyrie (1995), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is a book-length sonnet sequence exploring the lives of people affected by the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. She has also written a collection of essays, The Flexible Lyric (1999), and with Gregory Orr co-edited Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World (1996), a selection of essays on writing.

Bryant Voigt was a founder of the Goddard College low-residency MFA program, the first MFA program of its kind, and has also taught at Iowa Wesleyan College and MIT. She served as poet laureate of Vermont for four years. She has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and in 2015 she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship. She has lived in Vermont for many years. Read more at the Poetry Foundation.

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