OXFORD, Miss. – Award-winning poet Sheryl St. Germain visits the University of Mississippi April 7 as part of the John and Renee Grisham Visiting Writer Series.
St. Germain is scheduled to give a 7 p.m. reading at the Ole Miss-Oxford Depot. She plans to sign books immediately following the event, which is free and open to the public.
“Sheryl St. Germain is a powerful poet and essayist,” said Ann Fisher-Wirth, professor of English. “Her work is passionate, sensual, celebratory and bracingly honest. Her visit here is sure to be an electrifying occasion.”
St. Germain is the author of numerous books of poetry, including “Going Home,” “The Mask of Medusa,” “Making Bread at Midnight,” “How Heavy the Breath of God” and “The Journals of Scheherazade.” She also has published a book of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, “Je Suis Cadien,” and a book of lyric essays, “Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman.” Her latest collection, “Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems,” was published in 2007.
Born in New Orleans, St. Germain earned her bachelor’s degree from Southeastern Louisiana University and both master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has taught creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College and Iowa State University. She is director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Chatham University, where she also teaches poetry and creative nonfiction.
Her work has been recognized with several awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation and, most recently, the William Faulkner Award for personal essay.
“I do not think I have ever encountered a poet less self-consciously or more powerfully female,” wrote Burton Raffel of The Literary Review. “St. Germain does not try to intellectualize or abstract her gender; neither does she try to escape from it … (S)he accepts herself with a fullness, an intensity and with a gloriously swaggering melodiousness that are, I think, new to poetry in our language.”
For more information or for assistance related to a disability, contact Ann Fisher-Wirth at 662-915-5929 or by e-mail afwirth@olemiss.edu.