Monday, January 30, 2012

Belmont Hosts Poet Chad Sweeney on February 9


On Thursday, February 9 (7:30 p.m., Multimedia Hall, Bunch Library), Belmont will host poet, translator, and professor Chad Sweeney for a reading and lecture, followed by Q&A (Culture & Arts convo credit offered). According to Belmont professor Gary McDowell, Sweeney's poetry, "with leanings toward the surreal and fantastical, offers spiritual enlightenment while liquefying the boundaries between imagination and the very world it inhabitshis work always surprises, always transforms, and always inspires its audience." A video clip of such work can be found here. Be sure to mark your calendars for this exciting event!


Below is Sweeney's biographical info from http://www.chadsweeney.com/bio.html:

"Chad Sweeney is a poet and translator. He is the author of four books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009)An Architecture (BlazeVox, 2007), and Wolf Milk: Lost Poems of Juan Sweeney (Forklift, 2012, bilingual English/Spanish). He is the translator (from the Persian, with Mojdeh Marashi) of The Selected Poems of H.E. Sayeh:The Art of Stepping Through Time (White Pine, 2011). He has published five chapbooks of poetry, including A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2006) and the bilingual (English/Spanish) Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre (Forklift, 2010), which has been translated into Catalán by poet Anna Aguilar-Amat of Barcelona. Sweeney edited the anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: the Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (CityLights, 2009) and is coeditor of Parthenon West Review, a print journal of contemporary poetry, translation and essays, based in San Francisco. Chad’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, The Pushcart Prize Anthology 2011, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Qtly, Verse, Volt, Barrow Street and The Writers Almanac. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and is a PhD candidate at Western Michigan University. He teaches poetry in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino, and lives in Redlands, California with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney, and their son Liam."