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).

Both events are open to the public at no cost. Language Arts Live is sponsored by the Bates English department, the Humanities Fund, the Learning Associates Program and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information, please contact this eosucha@bates.edu.

Digital poet Brian Kim Stefans reads and performs from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 4, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave. Known primarily as a poet, Stefans also works as a visual and new-media artist and critic and is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His most recent book of poetry, Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works (Roof Publishing, 2007), continues the critical acclaim accorded his other books. He is also the author of Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews 1994-2005 (Salt Publishing, 2003), an informal chronicle of digital poetics/Asian American poetry in the from the past decade.

Stefans has had a key role in shaping the terrain of new media poetics. A prolific e-book publisher, Arras places much of his work on his Web site, arras.net, devoted to digital poetics and new media. He is the editor of the /ubu (”slash ubu”) series of e-books. His internet art and digital poems, such as The Truth Interview (with Kim Rosenfield) and the Flash Polaroids can all be found at arras.net.

Language Arts Live presents an evening with poets Caroline Knox, Dorothea Lasky and Dara Weir from the Wave Books poetry press at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

An award-winning poet, Knox will release her seventh poetry collection, “Nine Worthies” in 2010. Knox is the winner of the Recommended Reading Award in 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book and the Maurice English Award in 2005, and has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Yale/Mellon Visiting Faculty Program, and from Poetry magazine. Knox’s work has been further anthologized in two editions of the classic collection “Best American Poetry” in 1988 and 1994.

Lasky is the author of two full-length poetry collections: AWE (2007) and Black Life (2010). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and other journals. She holds a master’s in fine arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s in education from Harvard University.

To promote AWE, Lasky held a virtual book tour, posting videos of herself reading in different rooms of her house over the course of a month. In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, she said of her video readings, “I think there’s something about the video. It’s a different kind of intimacy than going to see someone read: You can be really close to the person in a way that you couldn’t if you were sitting there.”

Weir is the author of nine collections of poetry including Selected Poems (2009) and Remnant of Hannah (2006). Recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Weir held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in 2005. She is the 2001 winner of the American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize.

Weir’s poetry “draw[s] a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence” said a writer for the Harvard Review.

Weir currently directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Bradfield is a visual artist, Web designer, naturalist and poet. Her poetry focuses on both the self and the greater natural world. It “turns a critical, loving eye on her own nature as a lesbian, as well as on the queer world of nature, which she interprets as a professional naturalist hired to show people what to see in what they see,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote.

The author of Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books, 2008) and Approaching Ice (Persea Books, 2009), Bradfield has received fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Program, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Interpretive Work won the 2009 Audre Lorde Award in Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, celebrating lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender literature.

Bradfield is the founder and manager of Broadsided Press, an online collaborative press that publishes monthly visual and literary collaborations as Adobe Acrobat files that are downloaded and shared around the world.

Bradfield has a master’s degree in poetry from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she lived for five years. She now lives on Cape Cod.

Jack Collom, a poet, poetry teacher and author of more than 23 published books and chapbooks, reads from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Presented by the Language Arts Live Series at Bates, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. For more information, contact this jskinner@bates.edu or this eosucha@bates.edu.

Collom’s visit is made possible by a Bates College Learning Associate Grant. Language Arts Live, featuring contemporary authors reading from their works, is sponsored by the Bates English department, the environmental studies and Spanish programs, the Learning Associates Program, the Bates Humanities Fund and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund.

Born in 1931, Collom grew up in small-town Illinois and Colorado. A nature lover, he studied forestry at Colorado Agriculture and Mechanical College. After four years in the U.S. Air Force as a clerk-typist, he worked in factories for 20 years while developing as a poet.

For the past 30 years, Collom has worked as a freelance poetry teacher, and has also taught in the writing program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.

Collom’s latest book is “Situations, Sings” (with Lyn Hejinian; Adventures in Poetry, 2008) and “Exchanges of Earth & Sky” (Fishdrum, 2006). His book of selected poems, “Red Car Goes By,” was published by Tuumba Press in 2001. He produced three books on and of writings by children, and has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional events in the Language Arts Alive series this fall include:

Poets Tessa Nicholas, former editor of the Carolina Quarterly, and Arielle Greenberg, author of the collections “My Kafka Century” and “Given,” read from their works at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Poet and playwright Chris Vitiello, a founding editor of Proliferation magazine, reads at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 12, in Skelton Lounge at Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Poet Bill Berkson, author of 16 books and pamphlets of poetry, and the 2004 Distinguished Paul Mellon Fellow at the Skowhegan School, reads from his writings at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19, in Skelton Lounge in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña speaks at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. Additionally, a premiere screening of Vicuña’s film “Kon Kon” takes place at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3, in Room 104, Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. For more information on the artist’s work, see www.ceciliavicuna.org.

Finally, the prolific poet Theodore Enslin of Milbridge, Maine, appears at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 30, in Skelton. His 119th volume, the prose collection “I, Benjamin, A Quasi-Autobiography,” appeared this year.

Samantha Hunt, who wrote a novel about the inventor Nikola Tesla, and Two Kinds of Decay author Sarah Manguso are among the writers reading from and discussing their work in a Bates College literary series during March.

• Monday, March 16 at 4:15 p.m.
• Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave

Sarah Manguso, author of the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay, reads from her prose at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in Bates College’s Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public at no cost. Manguso, whose memoir describes her affliction, as a college student, with a debilitating auto-immune disease (now in remission), appears as part of the yearlong Language Arts Live series at Bates.

Presenting nationally renowned writers, the series is sponsored by the English department, the programs in environmental studies and Asian studies, the Bates Humanities Fund, Bates OUTfront and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund.

“Contrary to the usual cliché, illness did not make Manguso a better person,” a Boston Globe reviewer wrote of The Two Kinds of Decay (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). “It made her a more thoughtful, self-aware person. In simple, unsentimental language, she describes her initial symptoms, her sudden attacks, her treatments, her suicidal depression, and her progress as a patient and, incidentally, as a person.”

Manguso’s other books include the short-story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s, 2007), and the poetry collections “Siste Viator” (Four Way Books, 2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James Books, 2002). Her writings and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The New Republic and The Boston Review. She received a Pushcart Prize and the Rome Prize in Literature for 2007-08.

Manguso’s profile as a poet is distinctive because “her primary artistic medium is prose poetry, a form that simultaneously departs from conventional discourses of the lyric and subverts our expectations of narrative prose,” explains Eden Osucha, an associate professor of English at Bates and one of the three organizers of the Language Arts Live series.

The others are Jonathan Skinner, assistant professor of environmental studies, and Rob Farnsworth, visiting professor of English.

The series is designed “to generate excitement about literature as both a living and a ‘live’ art form,” Osucha explains. It’s also intended to support literary creation as a community practice at Bates, “and to work toward creating a culture around those ideals — a culture of readings, of conversation, of inspiration, excitement and wonder.”

She adds, “We want to bring artists that connect the diverse interests and backgrounds of staff, faculty and students, and connect with the rich and varied poetics and literary traditions of the broader Maine community.”

Manguso has served as a learning associate at Bates during the week of March 16, offering a poetry master class and visiting an English seminar to talk about The Two Kinds of Decay in addition to the public reading.

Award-winning poets Pamela Alexander ’70 and X. J. Kennedy P’86 and ’94 read from their work in celebration of the inauguration of the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund at 3 p.m. Sunday, May 4, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave., Bates College. A book signing and reception will immediately follow the reading, and the public is invited to attend at no charge.

Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Alexander is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Slow Fire (Ausable, 2007). Her other books are Inland (1997), which won an Iowa Poetry Prize; Commonwealth of Wings (Wesleyan, 1991); and Navigable Waterways (1984), which won a Yale Younger Poet award. Alexander has received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and the Ohio Arts Council.

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Alphabets, Best American Poetry 2000, The Extraordinary Tide, American Voices, Poetry for a Small Planet and Cape Discovery, and in many periodicals, including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Book Review, Orion, TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Journal, New Republic and American Scholar.

Some of Alexander’s poems have been included in an audio-anthology on CD; others were set to music for a public performance, broadcast as part of a satellite radio program and featured on the websites of National Public Radio and the American Academy of Poets.

A critically acclaimed author of adult and children’s poetry, Kennedy has taught English at the University of Michigan, the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now UNC Greensboro) and from 1963 through 1978 at Tufts, with visiting sojourns at Wellesley, University of California Irvine and the University of Leeds. In 1978, he became a free-lance writer.

Recognition of his writing includes the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets (for his first book, Nude Descending a Staircase, in 1961), the Los Angeles Book Award for poetry (for Cross Ties: Selected Poems, 1985), the Aiken-Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry (given by the University of the South and The Sewanee Review), Guggenheim and National Arts Council fellowships, the first Michael Braude Award for light verse (given by the American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters to a poet of any nation), the Shelley Memorial Award, the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club, the National Council of Teachers of English Year 2000 Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry and in 2004 the Poets’ Prize (for The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2002).

Kennedy received his undergraduate degree from Seton Hall and a Master’s degree from Columbia University. He followed his formal education with four years in the Navy as an enlisted journalist, serving aboard destroyers. He studied at the Sorbonne in 1955-56, then devoted the next six years, he says,  ”to failing to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.” He and his wife, Dorothy, live in Lexington, Mass.

John Tagliabue taught literature at Bates from 1953 until his retirement in 1989, and was a prolific and imaginative poet. During his decades on the Bates faculty, he gave readings himself, brought to campus many of the leading poetic voices of the 20th century, and was a friend to poets and creative artists around the world.

Funding for the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund was given by family members, friends, former students and colleagues to honor the service to the Bates community of John and his wife, Grace Tagliabue.Established in 2006, the fund supports poetry at Bates by bringing poets to campus for readings and other creative work, for residencies and teaching by poets and by offering support to students and faculty involved in the composition of poetry.