Hamilton – Poet Erin Belieu will give a reading of her work at Colgate University on Tuesday, February 16 at 4:00 p.m. in the Robert Ho Lecture Room (Lawrence Hall). The reading is co-sponsored by the university’s Humanities Colloquium Series and the English Department Poetry Series.
Of her own poetry, Erin Belieu says, ‘I know I am attracted to the outrageous, the absurd, the flawed, the corrupted, and to the underdogs’ cause.’ She says her writer heroes, such as Henry James, Jane Austen, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, and Sylvia Plath, ‘are those who can reveal human character for all of its contrary nobility as well as its flailing, petty foolishness.’
Belieu, who currently teaches literature and creative writing at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1965. Her first book, Infanta, was selected for publication by Hayden Carruth in the National Poetry Series and was chosen as one of the best books of poetry in 1995 by the National Book Critics’ Circle and the Washington Post Book World. Her second collection of poetry, One Above and One Below, will be published in February of 2000. Belieu’s poetry has received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Prize and an Academy of American Poetry prize. Her work has appeared in such places as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, and Triquarterly.
Belieu has a B.F.A. degree from the University of Nebraska and masters degrees in English and creative writing from The Ohio State University and Boston University. Between her college programs, she worked as a staff member for the Dukakis presidential campaign. After receiving her Boston University degree, Belieu was managing editor at AGNI Magazine, where she also served as poetry editor for several years.
For more information about the reading, which is free and open to the public, contact the Department of English at 315-228-7262.
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February 10, 1999