Poet Marianne Boruch continues Language Arts Live season

Essayist and award-winning poet Marianne Boruch continues the Language Arts Live series of literary readings at Bates at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 27, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Featuring highly regarded writers reading from and discussing their work, Language Arts Live events are open to the public at no cost. The series is sponsored by the English department, the Learning Associates Program, the Bates Humanities Fund, the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies, and the John Tagliabue Poetry fund.

The series resumes on Oct. 11 with novelist Debra Sparks. For more information, please contact 207-786-6326 or 207-786-6256, or these: rfarnsworth@bates.edu or eosucha@bates.edu.

“Boruch’s superb instinct for the structure of free verse and her fine eye for daily life have won her national respect,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “Few readers will come away unimpressed by the supple care Boruch takes in depicting her everyday scenes.”

Boruch has won awards for her six collections of poetry, of which the most recent is Grace, Fallen From (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). Her poems have been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The Yale Review and Poetry London.

She graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published two books of essays, the most recent being Poetry’s Old Air (University of Michigan Press, 1995). Her poems and prose have appeared in collections such as Poets of the New Century, The Best American Poetry, 2009 and the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry.

Boruch has received numerous awards, including the Strousse Award, two Pushcart Prizes and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has had residencies at the Anderson Center, The American Academy in Rome and The Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.

She has taught at the University of Maine Farmington and Warren Wilson College. She currently teaches English and directs the M.F.A. writing program at Purdue University. She plans to release a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, next year.

“Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice,” said fellow poet Robert Pinsky.