Writers Series features Gregerson and Olsen

The Grand Valley State University Writers Series continues with Linda Gregerson and William Olsen, on Monday, February 11, at 7:30 p.m. at the Alumni House, Allendale Campus. The event is free and open to the public.

A recent Guggenheim fellow and finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in Poetry, Gregerson is the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. Of her poems, The New Yorker has written, "Gregerson's rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically."

In her new volume Magnetic North, Linda Gregerson makes clearer than ever her passionate premise that the metaphysical only and always derives from profound embeddedness in physical reality. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry as well as in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly and other publications. Among her many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, three Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award.

Olsen, who teaches creative writing and literature at Western Michigan University and at Vermont College, is the editor of New Issues Press. He is co-editor, with Sharon Bryan, of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande), a book that has received critical acclaim for being the only anthology that brings together essays by nationally and internationally established poets on reading as a creative and critical activity.

Olsen is the author of four collections of poetry, including most recently, Avenue of Vanishing (Triquarterly, 2007). The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers (Illinois, 1988), which won the National Poetry Series, The Texas Poetry Award, and the Missouri Breakthrough Prize, was reissued as part of the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series in 2003. He is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, A Nation/ Discovery Award, The Texas Institute of Arts Award, a Breadloaf Fellowship, and poetry awards from Poetry Northwest and Crazyhorse. His poems and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies.

For more information, contact Ander Monson, assistant professor of writing and coordinator of the Grand Valley Writers Series for 2007-2008, at [email protected] or (616) 331-3601.