Poet Robert Chute to read at Bates

Award-winning poet Robert Chute will read from Sweeping the Sky, works in progress about Russian women combat pilots of World War II, at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 24, in the Special Collections room of Ladd Library. The public is invited to attend the Readings with Bates Authors presentation free of charge.

Chute’s books of poetry include Thirteen Moons-Treize Lunes, When Grandmother Decides to Die, Woodshed on the Moon: Thoreau Poems and Samuel Sewall Sails for Home, which won the Maine Arts Commission chapbook award in 1986. He received the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the editorial board of The Beloit Poetry Journal, for “Heat Wave in Concord,” a poem re-creating a scorching afternoon in 1852 when Henry David Thoreau cooled himself with a walk in a nearby river.

“This is a delicately erotic and exquisitely detailed portrait of a man, a day and an era,” said Marion Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal editor. “Chute has invented a fluid stanza to carry his narrative.”

Chute, Professor Emeritus of Biology and past chairman of both the department of biology and division of natural sciences at Bates, attended Bridgton High School and Fryeburg Academy. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maine and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Chute, who lives in Poland, served as director of the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and was chairman of the state Commission on Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering.