Poet and Princeton professor James Richardson.

Open to the public at no cost, Language Arts Live is sponsored by the Bates English department, Humanities Fund, Learning Associates Program and John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-6256 or 207-784-0416, or rfarnswo@bates.edu.

Richardson was described as “one of America’s most distinctive contemporary poets” by the Boston Review. His most recent book, By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Cooper Canyon Press, 2010) was a National Book Award finalist and Publishers Weekly’s “Book of the Year.”

His Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Ausable Press, 2004), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include Second Guesses (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), and the cult favorite Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2001).

Richardson is the fifth winner of the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, given annually to honor an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition.

His poetry appears frequently in The New Yorker, Slate and Paris Review. He has been a professor of English and creative writing at Princeton University since 1980. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and his doctorate from the University of Virginia.

Vermont's poet laureate, Sydney Lea.

Veteran poet Sydney Lea, whom author Michael Pollan called “as fine a companion on the page as American writing about nature has to offer,” continues Bates College’s Language Arts Live reading series at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Open to the public at no cost, Language Arts Live is sponsored by the English department, the Humanities Fund, the Learning Associates Program and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-6256 or 207-784-0416, or rfarnswo@bates.edu.

Recently named poet laureate of Vermont, Lea has been described as “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.” His most recent poetry collection is Young of the Year (Four Way Books, 2011). The collection I Was Thinking of Beauty is scheduled for publication by Four Way in 2013.

Lea founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. Of his previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize.

In 1989, Lea published the novel A Place in Mind (Scribner). His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was reissued by the Lyons Press in 2003.

Lea has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury colleges, as well as institutions in Europe. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as numerous anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vt., where he is active in statewide literacy and conservation efforts.

Emily Barton, author of two novels that The New York Times designated “Notable Books of the Year,” reads from her work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 10, in Chase Hall’s Skelton Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

This Language Arts Live reading is open to the public at no cost. It is sponsored by the English department, the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies, the Learning Associates Program, the Humanities Fund, the Brandow Family Fund for the Arts, the Office of Intercultural Education and the John Tagliabue Fund. For more information, call 207-786-6256 or 207-786-6326.

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Barton’s novels are Brookland (2006) and The Testament of Yves Gundron (2000). Beautifully written, breathtaking in scope, Brookland is the story of a 19th-century woman determined to build a bridge across New York’s East River.

A New York Times Book Review critic said of the novel: “So much modern fiction thinks small, feels small. Emily Barton will never be accused of either . . . Brookland turns out to be a story not just of risk, daring and ambition, but of the courage to fail — and the courage to live on after failing.”

Her debut novel, Yves Gundron uses a historic manuscript as the mainspring for a witty exploration of the double-edged sword presented by modern technology. “Barton is ultimately concerned with holding on to one’s inner life in a rapidly changing world,” wrote Village Voice reviewer David Yaffe.

“For a novelist casting a skeptical eye toward innovation, nothing could be more blissfully old-fashioned.”

Barton’s fiction, criticism and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Story magazine, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, the New York Observer and Poetry magazine.

Barton teaches in Columbia University’s Masters of Fine Arts program and at Yale University. She previously taught writing at Princeton, Bard and The New School’s Lang College.

Author Ander Monson, author of the 2005 poetry collection Vacationland and this year’s nonfiction Vanishing Point, visits Bates College to read from his work at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 17, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public at no cost. The Language Arts Live series is sponsored by the English department, the Learning Associates Program, the Humanities Fund, the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies and the John Tagliabue fund. For more information contact 207-786-6256 or 207-786-6326.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review described Monson as “a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, designer of both Web and print pages, and compulsive techno-tinkerer, and he’s always got multiple projects brewing.”

His other books include the fiction Other Electricities (Sarabande Books, 2005); the nonfiction Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (Graywolf Press, 2007) and another poetry volume, The Available World (Sarabande, 2010).

In his introduction to Neck Deep, Robert Polito called Monson “so cunning and quick-witted as an essayist that it’s almost easy to miss just how touching, how human, how stubbornly elegiac his writing can be.”

Originating from Michigan, Monson lives in Tucson, Ariz., where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press, and teaches at the University of Arizona.

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).

Essayist and award-winning poet Marianne Boruch continues the Language Arts Live series of literary readings at Bates at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 27, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Featuring highly regarded writers reading from and discussing their work, Language Arts Live events are open to the public at no cost. 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.

The series resumes on Oct. 11 with novelist Debra Sparks. For more information, please contact 207-786-6326 or 207-786-6256, or these: rfarnsworth@bates.edu or eosucha@bates.edu.

“Boruch’s superb instinct for the structure of free verse and her fine eye for daily life have won her national respect,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “Few readers will come away unimpressed by the supple care Boruch takes in depicting her everyday scenes.”

Boruch has won awards for her six collections of poetry, of which the most recent is Grace, Fallen From (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). Her poems have been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The Yale Review and Poetry London.

She graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published two books of essays, the most recent being Poetry’s Old Air (University of Michigan Press, 1995). Her poems and prose have appeared in collections such as Poets of the New Century, The Best American Poetry, 2009 and the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry.

Boruch has received numerous awards, including the Strousse Award, two Pushcart Prizes and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has had residencies at the Anderson Center, The American Academy in Rome and The Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.

She has taught at the University of Maine Farmington and Warren Wilson College. She currently teaches English and directs the M.F.A. writing program at Purdue University. She plans to release a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, next year.

“Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice,” said fellow poet Robert Pinsky.

The author of the short story collection Unkempt and the novel The Generosity of Women, Courtney Eldridge visits Bates College to read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 22, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall.

Eldridge is presented by Language Arts Live, a series at Bates featuring highly regarded writers reading from and discussing 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.

Events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6326 or 207-786-6256, or this rfarnsworth@bates.edu or this eosucha@bates.edu.

The series resumes on Sept. 27 with poet Marianne Boruch.

In Unkempt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle observed that Eldridge “creates dark chaotic worlds, then traps the reader inside this space until they have read the last word, thereby becoming her collaborator. Not yet satisfied, Eldridge then tightens the snare, leading the reader deep inside each narrator’s psyche as they grapple with the diseases of our world.

“She dissects compulsions, manias, food addictions, antics of an alcoholic parent and the irrational fear of confronting sharks in swimming pools.”

In 2006, Eldridge was awarded the Prix du Marais for Record à battre, the French translation of her novella, The Former World Record Holder Settles Down. She has received fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Ucross Foundation.

Her work has appeared in numerous literary publications and magazines, including The Mississippi Review, Post Road, BOMB and the New York Times Magazine, as well as the anthologies Nerve: Literate Smut and Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney’s, Humor Category.

She is completing two novels: a work of science fiction and a tale that explores teen intimacy in the age of social media. Learn more.

A writer and critic, LaFarge reads from and discusses his work at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 13, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

The reading is 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, it is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact this eosucha@bates.edu.

LaFarge is the author of The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s, 2005), Haussmann, 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 Haussmann 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!’ “

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!’ “

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.