One of Maine’s most respected poets, Wesley McNair visits Bates at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 28.

His appearance, part of the Language Arts Live series of literary readings at Bates, takes place in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave., and is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6326 or 207-786-6256.

Language Arts Live brings highly regarded writers to Bates to read from and discuss their work. 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.

One of Maine’s most effective advocates of the art of poetry, McNair’s poems have won praise from readers, reviewers and fellow poets alike for more than 40 years. Intended to be “both accessible and complex,” as a reviewer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote, his lines find truth in the small, often overlooked events of our common existence.

His most recent book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 2010), which showcases some of his best poetry from six previous volumes and a sampling of new work. He has authored or edited 18 books, including poetry, nonfiction and anthologies.

In 2006, McNair was selected for a prestigious United States Artists Fellowship, awarded annually to America’s finest living artists. He has held grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship in literature and two NEA fellowships.

McNair served four times on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and in 2010 served as guest editor in poetry for the Pushcart Prize anthology. His poetry has appeared in two editions of The Best American Poetry and in more than 50 anthologies, and has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and 14 episodes of The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

McNair, of Mercer, served as a professor at the University of Maine at Farmington from 1987 until his retirement in 2004; founded and directed the Creative Writing program there; and is now UMF’s Writer in Residence.

He was a visiting professor at Colby College from 1999 to 2004. Colby acquired his personal papers in 2006 and has created an interactive McNair archive and teaching site on the Web.

Bates has a long tradition of welcoming poets and fiction writers to read from their work. During a 1932 U.S. tour, William Butler Yeats read his poetry to a large audience in the Bates Chapel. For 30 years, the inimitable Bates professor and poet John Tagliabue brought many distinguished writers to campus, including Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Since 1991, when it formally instituted a concentration in creative writing within the major, the English department has hosted public readings, class visits and residencies by more than 75 acclaimed poets and writers, among them Nobel Prize laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott; Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Muldoon, Donald Justice, Bates alumna Elizabeth Strout, Yusef Komunyakaa and Richard Ford; Carolyn Forché, Grace Paley, Galway Kinnell, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky and Sarah Manguso.

Recent Bates alums who have authored prize-winning first books have also returned to read: Jessica Anthony (class of 1996), Christian Barter (1990), Gabriel Fried (1996), Christina Chiu (1991) and Craig Teicher (2001).

EDITOR’S NOTE: The appearance by novelist Paul LaFarge described below has been rescheduled for May 13.

Three established novelists, including the Bates alumna who wrote the acclaimed debut The Convalescent, read from their work in March and April in Bates College’s Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

The readings are part of Bates’ Language Arts Live series of literary events. Sponsored by the Bates English department, the programs in environmental studies and Spanish, the Humanities Fund, the Learning Associates Program and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund, they are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact this eosucha@bates.edu.

James Hannaham, author of God Says No (McSweeney’s, 2009), reads from and discusses his work at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 4. “God Says No” follows gay African-American protagonist Gary Gray in his return to his home state of Florida as he struggles to define his own identity. In a review of the novel, the Austin Chronicle wrote that Hannaham’s prose, characterized by its “impressive discipline,” was what allowed for “such a thorough inhabitation of his character … There is no outsider salvation here, merely the small, funny tribulations of an American life.”

Hannaham’s short stories have appeared in the journals The Literary Review, Open City, One Story and Nerve. A recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center, Hannaham teaches creative writing at Pratt Institute.

Bates alumna Jessica Anthony reads from her work at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 18. Her debut novel, The Convalescent (McSweeney’s, 2009), was selected as an Editor’s Choice by the San Francisco Chronicle and appears on the American Library Association’s 2010 Notable Book List of Outstanding Fiction.

The Convalescent focuses on Rovar Pfliegman, a Hungarian meatseller in Virginia who lives in his portable meatselling shop: a bus. Integrating the stories of his Hungarian ancestors into Pfliegman’s own, the tale brings together past and present.

The San Francisco Chronicle called her work a dance “between then and now, painting history’s and Rovar’s unusual tragedies with traces of sympathy, shock and sadness, but mostly humor and resignation. . . . He belongs in the bus the same way his ancestors belonged on the sidelines of history, numbers dwindling … until there is only one Pfliegman left, Rovar, who, faced with extinction, instead finds himself reborn in the most awkwardly beautiful of ways.”

Anthony’s stories have appeared in anthologies such as Best New American Voices and McSweeney’s New American Writing. A member of the Bates class of 1996, she is a lecturer in English at the college.

Writer and critic Paul LaFarge discusses his work at 4:15 p.m., Monday, April 5. LaFarge is the author of The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s, 2005), Haussman, or the Distinction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001) and The Artist of the Missing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999).

A recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Macdowell Colony, LaFarge is the 2005 winner of the Bard College Fiction Prize and the winner of the California Book Award for The Artist of the Missing. He has taught creative writing at Wesleyan and Columbia.

The Facts of Winter and Haussman place LaFarge on the perimeter of the tale, purporting that he acts as a mere translator for obscure French writer and minimalist “Paul Poissel.” In an interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, LaFarge said that Poissel “came into strange existence a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly how. But I thought, ‘God, it would be great to invent a minor French poet!’ “