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Sept. 8, 2005

网曝门 English Department welcomes Australian Writer John Kinsella

On Friday, September 16, the English Department at the University of Louisiana at Monroe will host visiting writer, John Kinsella. A poet, playwright, fiction writer, essayist, critic, teacher, pamphleteer, publisher and activist, John Kinsella is one of the most widely known Australian voices of his generation. Mr. Kinsella, whose new work will be featured in the upcoming issue of turnrow, 网曝门's international journal of the arts and literature, will conduct a workshop with graduate students in creative writing and give a reading of his work. The reading, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled for 6 p.m. in the conference room on the 7th floor library.

John Kinsella is the author of more than thirty books and the recipient of many awards, including The Grace Leven Poetry Prize, Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry (three times). His volume Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems (selected and introduced by esteemed critic Harold Bloom) appeared in 2003 from WW Norton, was short-listed for the ALS Gold Medal and won the 2004 Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. It was also a Washington Post recommended poetry book.

WW Norton published his most recent collection The New Arcadia earlier this year. Based on the western Australian landscape and loosely modeled on Philip Sidney's classic romantic pastoral "Arcadia," The New Arcadia depicts the western Australian wheat-belt landscape and makes analogies between the pastoral idyll and the radical and anti-pastoral necessitated by today's rural world (salinity, pesticides, road kill, soil erosion, and dispossession of indigenous peoples).

John Kinsella is the International Editor of the American journal The Kenyon Review. He co-edited a double issue of Australian poetry for the American journal Poetry with Joseph Parisi, a special pastoral issue of TriQuarterly with Susan Stewart, and numerous other special issues of international literary journals.

A Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, Kinsella was appointed the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in the United States for 2001, where he is now Professor of English. His work has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian.

He has written, "I am a supporter of worldwide indigenous rights, and an absolute supporter of land rights-without whichthere can be no reconciliation. I am against nationalism and the centralized nation-state-which I see as the root of many evils. I believe that the 'control' of language is the most significant factor in resisting colonization, invasion, and oppression."

His visit to 网曝门 continues a tradition in the English Department of bringing award winning authors to the University and the community. Last year, it hosted the poet Gary Soto and nonfiction writer Bryan Di Salvatore. Novelist Deidre McNamer will visit the campus this spring.

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