Michael Gray
October 8, 2009
Ward Hall Great Room
11AM

Michael Gray is a critic, writer & broadcaster with an excellent international track-record in both music history and travel writing. He grew up on Merseyside and graduated in History & English Literature at York University in the 1960s, where he studied under the controversial, brilliant critic F. R. Leavis, and where as a student journalist he interviewed, among others, the eminent historian A. J. P. Taylor and the legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix.

His pioneering study of Bob Dylan’s work, “Song & Dance Man”, first published in the 1970s in Britain, America and Japan, was the first full-length critical study of this crucial 20th Century cultural figure. It is now recognized as a classic in its field. A second, updated edition was published in Britain in 1981 and in the US in 1982. A selection of pieces on Dylan, “All Across The Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook”, was co-edited by Gray in 1987.

The massive third edition of his Bob Dylan study, “Song & Dance Man III” was published by Cassell Academic in London in 1999 and in the US by Continuum in March 2000. A special reprint appeared in the US in April 2001, when Gray delivered talks at a number of US universities, and a fourth reprint was published in New York and London in 2002. A fifth reprint was issued in 2004, a sixth in 2006, and this highly successful title is still on sale.

Michael Gray has also delivered lectures for the Institute for Folklore Studies in Great Britain & Canada, the Northern Ireland Arts Council, at York & Exeter Universities and Goldsmiths College, London, and at conventions in Austria and England. In 1999 he was a plenary speaker at the first annual Robert Shelton Memorial Conference at Liverpool University and the keynote speaker at the 2001 conference. In 2006 he was the closing speaker at the Bob Dylan Congress at the Institut für Sozialforschung, Goethe University, Frankfurt, and in March 2007 he gave the closing address at the University of Minnesota’s three-day academic symposium on Dylan’s work, at which other speakers included Christopher Ricks and Greil Marcus

Vivian Shipley
October 29, 2009
Ward Hall Great Room
11 AM

Vivian Shipley is the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and the Editor of Connecticut Review from Southern Connecticut State University. She has published five chapbooks and her seventh book of poems, Hardboot: Poems New & Old, won the 2006 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2006 Connecticut Press Club Prize for Best Creative Writing. She won the 2005 Lifetime  Achievement Award for Service to the Literary Community from the Library of Congress Connecticut Center for the Book and the 2005 SCSU Faculty Scholar Award.  Gleanings: Old Poems, New Poems, won the Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  When There Is No Shore, also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, won the 2003 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry from the Library of Congress Center for the Book, and the 2002 Word Press Poetry Prize.  Shipley was raised in Kentucky and has a PhD from Vanderbilt.  Her most recent poetry prize is the 2007 Hackney Literary Award for Poetry from Birmingham-Southern University.

Glenn Morazzini
Paumanok Award Winner
2008
December 3, 2009
Ward Hall Great Room
11 AM

An ex-boxer, Glenn Morazzini has worked for a number of years as a psychotherapist.  In 2006, he his MFA from the Stonecoast  Creative Writing Program.  Since then, he has published a number of award winning poems, “Ars Poetica Harmonica,” “The Year I Won the Cy Young Award,” “Sonny’s Song,”   and “My Uncles, The Italians,” which won first place in the 2007 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest.  He also received a Poetry Fellowship from the Martin Dibner Foundation in 2007.

Joan Larkin
2008 Paumanok Poetry Award Runner-up
February 18, 2010
Ward Hall Great Room
11 AM

Joan Larkin’s most recent collection, My Body:  New and Selected Poems received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award.  Her previous books include Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana’s Love Poems (translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River which received the Lambda Literary Award for poetry.  Larkin co-founded the independent press, Out & Out Books, during the 1970’s and has edited four anthologies of poetry and prose.  “The Living,” her verse play about AIDS, has been produced at festivals in Boston and Brooklyn.  Larkin has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She lives in Brooklyn and is now in her fourth decade of teaching.

Joseph Duemer
March 18, 2010
2008 Paumanok Poetry Award
Runner-up
Ward Hall Great Room
11 AM

Joseph Duemer is Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University in northern New York and is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Magical Thinking.  He is the poetry editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal.  His poems have appeared in The Iowa review, American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest (first series), Tampa Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Babel (online), Stand (UK), and others.  He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In 2000 – 2001, he was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Hanoi, Vietnam.  He blogs at sharpsand.net.  In the summer of 2009, he will be teaching workshops on political poetry in the Split Rock Arts Program at the University of Minnesota.

English Awards Day
Featured Speaker
April 22, 2010
Ward Hall Great Room
11 AM