On Thursday and Friday, October 25-26, poet Maurice Manning will be the featured author at Emory & Henry’s 31st annual Literary Festival. Born in Danville, Kentucky, and educated at Earlham College and the University of Alabama, Manning has published four collections of poems. His first, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001), won the Yale Younger Poets Award and was selected for that award by W. S. Merwin. His second, A Companion for Owls (2004), focuses on legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone, who is the speaker of the poems. In 2007 Manning published Bucolics, a series of prayer-poems that Andrew Hudgins has called "a rich, lyrical meditation on the reciprocal relations between the divine and the human, creator and created." Manning’s most recent book, The Common Man (2010), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and helped earn the poet a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The festival schedule appears below. All these events will occur in the College’s Board of Visitors Lounge in the Van Dyke Center. They are free of charge, and the public is encouraged to attend.
Thursday, Oct. 25:
2:30–“‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’, Chet’: What to Expect from Maurice Manning,” Barbara Smith, Alderson-Broaddus College
3:30–“Return of the Native Speaker: Maurice Manning’s Appalachian Dramatic Monologues,” Jesse Graves, East Tennessee State University
7:30–Maurice Manning reads from his work
Friday, Oct. 26:
2:30–“The Ecstatic Vernacular Vision of Maurice Manning,” Lisa Russ Spaar, University of Virginia at Charlottesville
3:30–Public Interview with Maurice Manning, conducted by Nathaniel Perry, Hampden-Sydney College
