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Visiting Poets to Present Reading

CONWAY, Ark. (October 1, 2013) – Acclaimed Southern poets C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander will be at Hendrix on Thursday, Oct. 3, at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall as the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation’s Murphy Visiting Poets for the 2013-2014 academic year.

The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing in Trieschmann Gallery. This event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language. For more information, contact Henryetta Vanaman, 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu.

Wright and Gander, a husband-wife duo who teach at Brown University, have each published numerous award-winning volumes of poetry as well as scholarly works. 

Wright, born and raised in the Arkansas Ozarks, has published a dozen collections, most recently One With Others, winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, The Lenore Marshall Award, and finalist for the National Book Award. Some of her other works include Rising, Falling, Hovering Like Something Flying Backwards, Steal Away and String Light. Her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana was awarded the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. Wright has been called “a true original, who manages to be odd, beautiful, tough as nails, and wonderfully inventive all in the same poetic line,” by Poets & Writers. She is also a National Book Award Finalist. Wright is a recipient of a Macarthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the Robert Creeley Award, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A translator, essayist, and the editor of two anthologies of Mexican poetry, Gander is the author of more than a dozen books, including collaborations with notable artists and photographers. Gander co-translated Spectacle & Pigsty, a collection of poems by Japanese poet Kiwao Nomura, which won the Best Translated Book Award for 2012. He has also translated Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, which was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Gander's essays have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. In 2008, Gander was named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow, one of 50 artists to be recognized for artistic excellence, unique artistic vision, and significant contributions to their fields. Gander is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Howard, and Whiting Foundations, and he has received two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry.

The Murphy Visiting Poet Series has included such nationally and internationally recognized poets as Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Ted Kooser, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, and Louise Glück.

Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in engaged liberal arts and sciences education. For the sixth consecutive year, Hendrix was named one of the country’s “Up and Coming” liberal arts colleges by U.S. News and World Report.  Hendrix is featured in the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges, as well as the 2014 Princeton Review’s The Best 378 Colleges, Forbes magazine's list of America's Top Colleges, and the 2014 Fiske Guide to Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu