IWU News

Illinois Poetry to be Read at Illinois Wesleyan University

November 4, 2004

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. -- Three accomplished poets will present literature of place poetry on Thursday, Nov. 18, at 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the Bates and Merwin Reading Room of The Ames Library, 1 Ames Plaza East, Bloomington. Reading their poetry about Illinois will be Kathryn Kerr, Bill Morgan and Illinois Wesleyan Professor Emeritus of English James McGowan.

The program, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Ecology Action Center in Normal as part of the center’s year-long celebration of its 10 year anniversary.

A reception will follow at the Ecology Action Center, 202 W. College Ave., Normal.

Kerr, a writing professor at Illinois State University, holds a Master of the Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and a Master of Science in botany from Eastern Illinois University. She won a Pushcart Foundation Writer’s Choice Award for her book First Frost and was one of the Illinois poets featured in the Benchmark Anthology. Kerr recently published a book review in The Chicago Tribune and poems in The Kerf, Dust and Fire, and Drought. Her poem, “In the Cafe” will be one of the poems on the bus in St. Louis for the “Poetry in Motion” program.

Morgan, a retired English professor at Illinois State University, has written poetry and scholarly and critical essays that have been published in several journals such as Pikestaff Review, Poems that Thump in the Dark, Poetry Motel, Anathema Review, among others. Morgan’s newest chapbook, a small book containing his new Illinois landscape poems, Sky With Six Geese, will be published by Pudding House Press in 2005. With his colleagues Lucia Getsi and Bruce Bergethon, he produces Poetry Radio, a poetry-in-performance radio show airing on WGLT Radio. He also manages a Web site dedicated to Thomas Hardy’s poetry and has published two edited books and a number of scholarly and critical essays on Hardy.

McGowan won Illinois Art Council Awards for his poems in 1980 and 1984 and has published poetry, translations and reviews in numerous literary magazines. He authored a collection of poems, Each Other--Where We Are and 66 Translations from the Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs Du Mal.” He also co-edited Benchmark: An Anthropology of Illinois Poetry. McGowan has a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Middlebury College and a Master of the Arts and Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He taught English at Illinois Wesleyan from 1969 to 2000, as well as at Monmouth College from 1966-1967 and was a teaching assistant at Rutgers University from 1963 to 1965. McGowan, a native of New Jersey, came to Illinois in 1969 and has lived, since then, in Bloomington, and recently, Normal.

For additional information, contact The Ecology Action Center at (309) 454-3169.