SCC CELEBRATES NATIONAL POETRY MONTH WITH DR. ALIKI BARNSTONE

04/10/2017

Southeastern Community College will celebrate April as National Poetry Month by hosting a Visiting Writers Series event on Saturday, April 15, at 8:00 p.m.. Scheduled to read is Dr. Aliki Barnstone, a nationally acclaimed and award-winning author. SCC’s Culture on Campus Committee and Di Dante Literature & Writing Club will co-host the event.

SCC English & Creative Writing Instructor and Di Dante Advisor Charles Burm notes, “Members of SCC’s Culture on Campus Committee feel it is important to provide our students and the greater community with cultural opportunities that otherwise may be difficult to access. It is our honor and pleasure to bring this distinguished writer to our campus.”

The reading will be held in the Little Theatre, Room 333, on SCC’s West Burlington campus and will be followed by a brief question and answer session with the author. All Visiting Writers Series events are free and open to the public, but space is limited. Therefore, guests are encouraged to arrive and be seated by 7:45 p.m. Free refreshments will be provided at the close of the presentation.

Burm is quick in promoting the talent of the guest poet and the cooperative efforts of multiple organizations to make SCC’s Visiting Writers Series successful. “Aliki Barnstone has gathered much praise and has earned many awards for her writing. Her work has been widely published, and she is highly regarded in her field. We are fortunate to have her with us to celebrate National Poetry Month.”

In a review of Dr. Barnstone’s collection Blue Earth, Virgil Suárez writes, “It’s both a delight and a pleasure in this vast American poetic landscape to read a poet as breath-taking and luminous as Aliki Barnstone. . . . she gives us the best of herself, her voice, and she writes as if possessed by the language of angels. . . . There’s a richness here that is meant to be savored, like the best of life, over and over again. Aliki Barnstone is a poet of worldly substance and great love. She’s doing the work of sustenance that keeps many of us in love and well-nourished.”

Burm continues, “Much credit should go to the Burlington Area Arts Council, the Burlington Fine Arts League, the Society of Great River Poets, the SCC Foundation, and many area businesses and individuals for supporting SCC’s Culture on Campus Committee, the Visiting Writers Series, and Di Dante Literature & Writing Club students and projects. Through cooperative institutional and community efforts, we are able to host a writer of Dr. Barnstone’s caliber.”

Dr. Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Dwelling (2016), Bright Body (2011), and Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (2009). Her first book of poems, The Real Tin Flower (1968), was published when she was 12 years old, and it includes a forward by Anne Sexton. She is the author of the critical study Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson's Poetic Development (2007), and she wrote the introduction and reader’s notes for H.D.'s Trilogy (1997). Her awards include a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Greece, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and a residency at the Anderson Center at Tower View, Red Wing, Minnesota. She is a University of Missouri (Columbia) Professor of English and Creative Writing, and she serves as the current Poet Laureate of the State of Missouri.

A file photo of Dr. Barnstone is available for download here: https://www.scciowa.edu/marketing/2017/photos/barnstone.jpg

All Visiting Writers Series events are free and open to the public, but space is limited. Guests are encouraged to arrive and be seated by 7:45 p.m. For more information, contact Charles Burm, cburm@scciowa.edu, (319) 208-5230. 

 For more news or to learn about Southeastern Community College, visit: https://www.scciowa.edu/rss/news/index.html

Or subscribe to our twitter feed: http://twitter.com/scciowa