Stephen Dunn, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a visiting distinguished professor at West Virginia University, is scheduled to present”Something Like the Truth: The Artist After 9/11”Thursday, Nov. 21, at 7:30 p.m. in the Mountainlair Gluck Theater. Dunn will address the formidable task of creating art and writing poetry after the tragic events in New York, Washington, D.C. and rural Pennsylvania last year.
“The talk will focus on my strong initial leanings toward patriotism and revenge on one hand and the gradual considerations of global politics and, therefore, greater ambiguities on the other,”Dunn said.”In essence, it will be a talk about the need to resist easy honesties while seeking something like the truth �€in other words, how to maintain the mindset of the artist in a time of crisis.”
WVU ’s English Department brought Dunn to campus this past spring for a reading of his poetry collection, Different Hours , to a capacity crowd of more than 150 people. The Eberly College of Arts and Sciences brought him back this semester as the inaugural Jackson Distinguished Visiting Professor of English. He is teaching a graduate workshop in poetry writing this semester.
Dunn is a trustee fellow in the arts and distinguished professor of creative writing at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, where he teaches courses in poetry writing, fiction writing, contemporary world poetry and American literature.
He earned his B.A. in history and English from HofstraUniversity in 1962 and attended the New School Writing Workshops from 1964 to 1966. Dunn went on to earn his M.A. in creative writing from SyracuseUniversity in 1970.
In addition to receiving the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, Dunn has garnered numerous awards and honors for his writing. He has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and he has won an Academy Award in Literature from the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, the James Wright Prize, the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at ColumbiaUniversity, PrincetonUniversity and the University of Michigan.
He has given dozens of poetry readings at colleges and universities, including Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Florida State, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Texas, Harvard and Princeton. He also performed a reading at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 1995.
Dunn has also been published in such prestigious periodicals as The Atlantic , The Nation , The New Republic , The New Yorker and American Poetry Review .
“We are pleased to have this extraordinary writer and teacher on campus this semester,”said M. Duane Nellis, dean of the college.”Our ability to attract a recent Pulitzer Prize winner to our faculty is representative of the strength of our expanding creative writing program.”