McCullers Center Joins the Georgia Poetry Circuit

            The Carson McCullers Center is happy to announce its recent membership in the Georgia Poetry Circuit, through which it will host readings by three nationally known, award-winning poets during the 2005-2006 school year.  This year’s poets are Robert Wrigley, Larissa Szporluk, and Albert Goldbarth.

            Each year the Georgia Poetry Circuit’s members nominate and vote on three individuals to be the following year’s featured poets.  During the fall, each poet spends one week traveling to five of the institutions to give workshops and readings, then, in the spring, spends a week traveling to the other five institutions.  Other member institutions include the University of Georgia, Berry College, Georgia Perimeter College, Brenau University, Georgia Southern, Mercer, Macon State, and Valdosta State Universities.

            Robert Wrigley, the first of the poets to come to Columbus State through the auspices of the McCullers Center, is the author of five books of poetry and two chapbooks.  He has received awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and he has won the Richard Hugo Memorial Award for Poetry, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry Magazine, and two Pushcart Prizes.  Robert Wrigley will give a workshop and a reading in Columbus on Wednesday, November 16.

            Albert Goldbarth, the second featured poet, will give a reading here on Friday, January 27.  Goldbarth is the author of 20 books of poetry.  Known for his often wildly comic, often acerbic pyrotechnical creations, Goldbarth has been the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two Voertman Poetry Awards from the Texas Institute of Letters.  His 1975 collection Jan.31 was nominated for the National Book Award. 

            Larissa Szporluk will give a poetry workshop and reading in Columbus during April, National Poetry Month.  An associate professor of creative writing and literature at Bowling Green State University, she is the author of three collections of poetry, Dark Sky Question (1998),  winner of the Barnard Poetry Prize, Isolato (2000), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind (2003).  Szporluk received a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 1998, and her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry 1999, Best of Beacon 1999, New American Voices, and Young American Poets.  She received an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2003.  Her workshop and reading will take place in Columbus on Wednesday, April 5.