Literary Arts Live celebrates the diverse vitalities of contemporary literature.

Bates has a long tradition of welcoming poets and authors to read from their work. In 1932 William Butler Yeats read from his poetry in the Chapel. From the 50s through the 80s, Bates professor-poet John Tagliabue brought many distinguished writers to campus, including Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks. First established as Language Arts Live in 1991 by senior lecturer emeritus Robert Farnsworth, the series has now hosted readings, class visits, and residencies by over 100 authors, among them Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, and Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford, Tyehimba Jess, Donald Justice, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Muldoon, Richard Russo, Tracy K. Smith, Elizabeth Strout, and Colson Whitehead. Recent Bates alums have also returned to read from their prize-winning books: Jessica Anthony, Christian Barter, Christina Chiu, Gabriel Fried, and Craig Teicher.

Literary Arts Live events are made possible from the generous support of the English Department, the John Tagliabue Fund, and the Learning Associates Fund. All events are wheelchair accessible, open to the public, and free of charge. For questions about our series, please contact Peter Philbin at pphilbin@bates.edu.

Upcoming Reading

Photo by Patri Hadad

Daniel Borzutzky
Thursday 03/14 @7PM
Pettengill G21

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books
are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year
2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National
Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His
most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca
Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His
translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s
Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl
Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at
the University of Illinois at Chicago.