Carolyne Wright, Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College, will give a reading at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 13 in the Alumni House Lounge at LC.
A poet, essayist, translator, and author, Wright will read a number of poems relating to the environment in keeping with LC's Year of the Environment, "A Greener Tomorrow Today." The reading is sponsored by the Richard H. Thornton Endowment in English with a book signing and reception to follow.
Wright's most recent book is A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), a Los Angeles Times Book Awards nominee and winner of the 2007 Independent Book Publishers Poetry Bronze Award.
Wright is teaching a 10-week workshop on poetry to LC students. "I want to instill in them a healthy respect for poetry as a genre and a way of looking at the world through poetry," she said, "and I want them to fall in love with poetry."
Poetry is more concise and more distilled than prose, Wright said. "I write about everything. I'm particularly interested in cross-cultural interaction and understanding."
Wright's previous book, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern Washington UP/Lynx House Books, 2nd edition 2005), won the Blue Lynx Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Other books of poetry include Premonitions of an Uneasy Guest (AWP Award Series); Stealing the Children (Ahsahta Press); an invitational chapbook, Carolyne Wright: Greatest Hits 1975 - 2001 (Pudding House Publications); a collection of essays; and volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali. Forthcoming is the anthology Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women (White Pine Press, 2008).
Wright is working on an investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile on a Fulbright Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende, The Road to Isla Negra, which received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from International Quarterly.
She spent four years on Indo-U.S. Subcommission and Fulbright Senior Research fellowships in Calcutta and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers for an anthology in progress, A Bouquet of Roses on the Burning Ground, for which she has received Witter Bynner Foundation grants and an NEA Grant in Translation, as well as a Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.
Wright has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the New England Poetry Club, and the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has been a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo.
She has held creative writing posts at Radcliffe, Sweet Briar College, Ashland University, Emory University, University of Wyoming, University of Miami, Oklahoma State University, University of Central Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, The College of Wooster, Cleveland State University, and Lynchburg College.
In 2005 she returned to her native Seattle, and serves on the faculty of the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program, the Richard Hugo House, and the Board of Directors of AWP.