NEWS RELEASE
Contact: David West (west@nsula.edu)
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466
3/19/2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NATCHITOCHES - Three distinguished writers, Sheryl St. Germain, R.S. Gwynn and Robert Morgan, will deliver lectures at Northwestern State University in April. St. Germain will speak on Saturday, April 5 at 4 p.m. Gwynn will speak on Tuesday, April 8 at 7:30 p.m. with Morgan scheduled on Tuesday, April 22 at 7:30 p.m. The lectures will be in the Reading Room on the second floor of Watson Library. Admission is free and open to the public. The series of speakers was organized by Associate Professor of English Julie Kane.
St. Germain directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University where she also teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships and an NEH Fellowship.
A native of New Orleans, St. Germain has taught creative writing at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College and Iowa State University. She has received the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and most recently the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay.
Her books include Going Home, The Mask of Medusa, Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, and The Journals of Scheherazade. She has also published a book of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien. A book of lyric essays, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, was published in 2003 by The University of Utah Press. Her most recent book is Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, published by Autumn House Press in 2007.
Gwynn, a poet, scholar, editor, and literary critic, is the author of No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000 from Story Line Press, as well as four other collections including The Narcissiad (1982) and The Drive-In (1986). He is the editor of the Pocket Anthology series from Penguin Academics/Longman and New Expansive Poetry from Story Line Press.
Gwynn began publishing as a college undergraduate, with poetry, fiction, and translations appearing in the New England Review and the Sewanee Review. His first collection of poetry, Bearing & Distance, was published by Cedar Rock Press in 1977 and was followed by The Narcissiad, a satirical poem, in 1982. His book of poems The Drive-In won the Breakthrough Award from the University of Missouri Press in 1986. No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000 was published by Story Line Press.
His poems appear in a number of anthologies and textbooks, including The Made Thing: Contemporary Southern Poetry, Sound and Sense, Western Wind, Rebel Angels: Twenty-five Poets of the New Formalism, and The Book of Forms, and he has also been a frequent contributor of reviews to the Sewanee Review and the Hudson Review. Gwynn has lectured and given poetry readings at more than 100 universities. In 1997, Gwynn was named University Professor at Lamar University, Lamar’s highest academic rank.
Morgan’s best-selling novel Gap Creek was an Oprah Book Club Selection, and his new biography of Daniel Boone is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography. He will be getting an Academy Award in American Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters this May 16th. His earliest publications were short stories, but Morgan began writing poetry in the late 1960’s. Morgan has published volumes of poetry, short stories, novels and non-fiction.
Morgan received NEA grants in 1974, 1981, and 1987. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. In 1991, Morgan was given the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the North Carolina Literature Award.
His novel The Truest Pleasure was listed by Publisher's Weekly as one of the notable books of 1995 and was finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Morgan’s story The Balm of Gilead Tree was included in the 1997 O. Henry Awards anthology Gap Creek, was published published by Algonquin Books in 1999. It was selected for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for 2000, and was chosen as Notable Book by the New York Times. Gap Creek was chosen by the Appalachian Writers Association as Book of the Year for 2000.
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