2015–16 Language Arts Live opens Sept. 24 with poet A. Van Jordan

A. Van Jordan, a poet whose four collections included 2013’s The Cineaste, a collection of responses to influential films, reads from his work at Bates at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

This Language Arts Live literary reading is sponsored by the English department and is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-753-6963.

“There is a real sensitivity in [Jordan’s] work to constructing character in ways that connect,” writes Jessica Plante on the storySouth website. “He makes people and their stories feel real, and relatable.”

In addition to The Cineaste (W. W. Norton & Company), Jordan’s books are Quantum Lyrics (Norton, 2007); ; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (Norton), listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; and Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001).

Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a United States Artists Fellowship.

Jordan has taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He now serves as the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at Rutgers University–Newark.