Tuesday, September 11
Celebrating Our Own
7:30 p.m.
Kiva Auditorium
Kent State Student Center
Undergraduate Winners
Zach Weiss, 1st place
Natasha Rodriguez-Carroll, 2nd place
Tracy Paar, 3rd place
Mathias Peralta, honorable mention
High School Winners
Sarah Ellis, 1st place
Sabra Corea, 2nd place
Tanaka Mupinga, 3rd place
Brooke Heasley, honorable mention
Wednesday, October 10
Edward Hirsch and Carolyn Creedon
7:30 p.m.
Kiva Auditorium
Kent State Student Center
Edward Hirsch, judge of the 2011 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including For the Sleepwalkers, winner of the Lavan Young Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; Wild Gratitude, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award; How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry; Special Orders; and most recently, The Living Fire. Hirsch has received many awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Carolyn Creedon is the winner of the 2011 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize for her book Wet. She is a writer, editor, and fifteen year veteran of the waitress wars. Creedon completed the Ada Comstock program at Smith College, and earned an MFA at the University of Virginia, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 2010 she was awarded the Alehouse Happy Hour Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, Rattle, Best New Poets, Best of the Best American Poets, and elsewhere. Creedon lives in Charlottesville with her husband, Paul Andrews and her dog, Medusa.
Tuesday, October 30
Ruth Schwartz
7:30 p.m.
306 ABC
Kent State Student Center
Ruth L. Schwartz is the author of five books of poetry, including Edgewater, a National Poetry Series winner; Dear Good Naked Morning, recipient of the Autumn House Poetry Prize; and most recently Miraculum. She is also the author of the memoir, Death in Reverse, and her creative nonfiction frequently appears in The Sun. Schwartz’s poetry has been widely anthologized, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Pablo Neruda prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation. Schwartz holds a PhD in Transpersonal Psychology, maintains a private healing practice, offers workshops nationally, and teaches in the MFA Program at Ashland University.
Tuesday, February 19
Lisa Ampleman and Heather Kirn Lanier
Informal Q&A
11:00 a.m.
Wick Poetry Corner
Reading
7:30 p.m.
306 ABC
Kent State Student Center
Lisa Ampleman received her B.A.from Beloit College and her MFA from George Mason University. Her chapbook of poems, I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You, was a winner of the 2010 Wick chapbook competition for Ohio poets. Her poems have appeared in Cave Wall, Court Green, Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. Ampleman was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry prize, and in 2011, she was a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship finalist. She is currently a Ph.D.candidate at the University of Cincinnati.
Heather Kirn Lanier is the author of Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America. Her chapbook, The Story You Tell Yourself, was a winner of the 2010 Wick Chapbook competition for Ohio poets. She has received a Rona Jaffe-Bread Loaf Scholarship in nonfiction and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, also in nonfiction. Her work has been noted in The Best American Essays Series, lauded by The Atlantic Monthly, and published in dozens of literary journals, including The Southern Review, Fourth Genre, The Cincinnati Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Sun.
Wednesday, March 20
William Pitt Root and Pam Uschuk
7:30 p.m.
306 ABC
Kent State Student Center
William Pitt Root is a prize-winning poet and frequent writer-in-residence whose works include White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West, Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom and Reasons for Going It on Foot.Translated into 20 languages, Root’s poetry has been featured in 300 journals such as New Yorker and The Atlantic, as well as more than 100 anthologies. His honors include grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Balancing time served in academia, he has worked in factories, a shipyard, and underground in a copper mine. Root is poetry editor for the literary journal Cutthroat. He lives near Southwest Colorado’s Weminuche Wilderness.
Pamela Uschuk is the author of six books of poems, including Finding Peaches in the Desert, Scattered Risks, Without the Comfort of Stars: New and Selected Poems (New Delhi, India), and Wild In The Plaza of Memory. Her poetry collection, CRAZY LOVE, won the 2010 American Book Award. Translated into a dozen languages, her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, such as Poetry, Agni Review, Best of the West, and Hunger Mountain. Uschuk is the recipient of many awards, including the War Poetry Prize New Millenium Poetry Prize, and the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women. Uschuk was the John C.Hodges Visiting Poet at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is currently the editor-in-chief of Cutthroat, as well as the director of the Cutthroat Online Writing Mentorship Program.
Thursday, April 18
Billy Collins
11:30 a.m.
Q&A
First Floor
University Library
7:30 p.m.
Reading
Ballroom
Kent State Student Center
Billy Collins, U.S.Poet Laureate (2001-2003), is the author of several books of poetry, including Ballistics; Nine Horses; Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems; The Art of Drowning, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marhall Poetry Prize; Questions About Angels, which was selected for the National Poetry Series; and most recently horoscopes for the dead. Collins’ new and selected collection of poems (2003-2013), Shouting Over the Machinery of Time, will be available March 2013. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks, and a variety of periodicals, such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker. Collins has edited Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, an anthology of contemporary poems for use in schools. Collins’ other honors and awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Wednesday, May 1
Giving Voice
6:30 p.m.
Ballroom
Kent State Student Center
The 12th annual performance of Giving Voice features local students (grades 3-12), senior citizens, veterans, and medical care providers and patients from area hospitals, performing original poetry. All material is created in Wick outreach programs, including workshops led by Kent State University undergraduates enrolled in the service-learning course “Teaching Poetry in the Schools.”