Thomas, who was born and raised on the island of St. Vincent, is known for his use of Caribbean folklore in his work and his exploration of that region’s complex social and cultural dynamics. At Bates he will read from his newest novel, Behind the Face of Winter (Tasar, 2001) and from his poetry collection Moving Through Darkness (Afo Enterprises, 1999).

Thomas is a professor of literature at Université Laval, Québec. His novel Spirits in the Dark (House of Anansi, 1998) was a finalist for the QSPELL/Hugh MacLennan Fiction Award. He also wrote From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel (Greenwood, 1988).

Thomas’ visit to Bates is sponsored by Amandla! and the departments of English, and theater and rhetoric.

Dennis won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Practical Gods (Penguin USA 2001), his eighth collection of verse and one that seeks to explore ordinary life in terms of religious mythology both biblical and pagan.

The New York Times Book Review has praised Dennis for his “wise, original and often deeply moving” poems that “ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving.”

A professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Dennis has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 he received the Ruth Lily Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. In announcing the award, Joseph Parisi, the editor of Poetry, called Dennis “a poet who has valuable things to say – about faith (or its absence) in the modern world, fear, loneliness, life’s regrets – the great What ifs and roads not taken – in ways that are personal and universal at the same time.”

“Jean Monahan’s Hands surprises the reader at every turn. These are poems of brilliant physicality in description, dramatic and often objective,” wrote poet Donald Hall in awarding Monahan the 1991 Anhinga Prize.

Vijay Seshadri, author of Wild Kingdom, described Monahan’s poems as “by turns tender and violent, ruefully intelligent and well-informed, and absolutely authentic.”

Monahan, has won the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA’s Open Voice Award and the John Williams Andrews Narrative Poetry Contest. She also was named runner-up in the 1991 National Poetry Competition.

Eady’s many honors include National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships, as well as Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s and Prairie Schooner Strousse awards.

Eady is an associate professor of English and director of the poetry center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.