Howard Building in the mist
Tobin

  • The Fall 2008 Visiting Writer, poet Paul Mariani, author of a forthcoming biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, read from his poems and delivered a lecture on the life of Hopkins.

    Paul Mariani has authored six volumes of poetry: Deaths and Transfigurations (2005), The Great Wheel (1996), Salvage Operations: New and Selected Poems (1990), Prime Mover (1985), Crossing Cocytus (1982), and Timing Devices (1979). Among his prose works are Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (2002), God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable (2002), and William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics (1975). He has also written biographies of Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and William Carlos Williams. The Crane, Lowell, and Williams biographies were each named New York Times Notable Books of the Year; the Williams biography (1982) also won the New Jersey Writers Award and was short-listed for an American Book Award.

    Dr. Mariani has held Guggenheim, NEA, and NEH fellowships. From 1968-2000 he was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; he is currently University Professor of English at Boston College.

  • The first Visiting Writer of 2008, poet Daniel Tobin, read from his poetry and gave a talk titled "Ancient Salt, American Grain," in which he examined the use of form and the conflict between formal and free verse poetics, arguing against their polarization using examples from Yeats, Frost, Olson, Ammons, and Bishop.

  • The second Visiting Writer of 2008, the novelist Ron Hansen, read from his work and delivered a lecture titled "Making Things Up," about the impulses and experiences that shaped him as a storyteller and convinced him that we need stories.  In asking "what happens to us when we read fiction or watch film?" Hansen's talk drew upon Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment and Stanislavski's "An Actor Prepares."  Mr. Hansen's works include a collection of short stories (Nebraska, 1989), a volume of essays (A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction, 2002), and six novels (Desperadoes, 1979; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 1983; Mariette in Ecstasy, 1991; Atticus, 1996; Hitler's Niece, 1999; and Isn't It Romantic?, 2003).  A seventh novel, Exiles, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May 2008.

    Hansen's many honors include a Wallace E. Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation grant, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a three-year fellowship from the Lyndhurst Foundation.  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and came to the screen as a highly acclaimed film in 2007.  Atticus was also a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award in Fiction.  Mr. Hansen is currently Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor of Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University in California.

  • The 2007 Visiting Writer, poet B.H. Fairchild, read from his poetry and gave a lecture, "A Way of Being: Some Thoughts on the Ends and Means of Poetry."

  • The 2006 Visiting Writer, novelist Tony Earley, read from his work and lectured on "The Thing and Other Thing: Saying the Unsaid in American Short Fiction."

  • The 2005 Visiting Writer was Scott Cairns, Poet and Professor of English at the University of Missouri.  Mr. Cairns read from his poetry and gave a lecture titled "Elemental Confusion: Towards a Sacramental Poetics."

  • Poet Andrew Hudgins and fiction writer Erin McGraw, of the Ohio State University, were the 2004 Visiting Writers.

  • Other visitors in this English department lecture program have included prose writers Paul Mariani, Doris Betts, Thomas Lynch, and Dennis Covington and poets Dave Smith, Kate Daniels, and Andrew Hudgins.