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Literature
and Spirituality Series 2006-2007
Thursdays at 4:15pm
YDS Book Store
409 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT
Refreshments for mind, body, and spirit will be served. Free and
open to the public.
October 5, 2006
Nikky Finney was born by the sea, in the small
fishing and farming community of Conway, South Carolina. Daughter
of a civil rights attorney and a teacher, Finney has been writing
for as long as she has memory. Poetry has always been her favorite
language: lavishly visual, plain-as-day lyrical, and passionately
portrait-yielding.
Finney received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature
from Talladega College in Alabama. While in graduate school at Atlanta
University, she dedicated herself to crafting a body of original
work.
In 1985, Finney published her first book of poems, On Wings
Made of Gauze. In 1995, Finney published Rice, a collection
of stories, poems, and photographs, which won the PEN American Open
Book Award in 1999. Finney’s 1998 volume of short stories,
Heartwood, was written to assist adult literacy students
across the country. Her latest poetry collection, The World
Is Round, was published in 2003, and won the 2004 Benjamin
Franklin Award for Poetry.
Finney is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky.
Her contagious energy and passion for writing extend beyond academia.
She travels extensively, as she puts it, “reading to listeners,
staying connected and engaged, and maintaining her commitment to
the risky business of creativity.”
November 2
Franz Wright is the author of thirteen collections
of poetry; his most recent, Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf
2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His newest collection, God’s
Silence, will be published by Knopf in January, 2006. Mr. Wright’s
other books include The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit:
New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995),
The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight
Postscript (1993). He has also translated poems by René
Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has received the
PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the
National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Wright has taught in colleges
and universities, including Emerson College and the University of
Arkansas. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington,
Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.
Born in Vienna and son of poet James Wright, Franz Wright began
writing when he was very young. At 15, he sent one of his poems
to his absentee father, who wrote back, “You’re a poet.
Welcome to hell.” James and Franz Wright are the only father
and son to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In a short essay
on writing, Franz writes, “Think of it: a writer actually
possesses the power to alter his past, to change what was once experienced
as defeat into victory and what was once experienced as speechless
anguish into a stroke of great good fortune or even something approaching
blessedness, depending upon what he does with that past, what he
makes out of it.” Charles Simic has characterized Mr. Wright
as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write
an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again,
Franz Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the
dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.
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