UNK– Lannan Literary Fellow poet Jon Davis will read his award-winning poetry at the University of Nebraska at Kearney on Thursday, Oct. 21.
Davis will read at 8 p.m. in the Choral Room, located in the UNK Fine Arts Building. The author of six collections of poetry, most recently “Preliminary Report,” Davis has received the Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, two National Endowments for the Arts Fellowships and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., for 20 years.
The “American Book Review” has described Davis’ works as: “…punctuated by subversive humor, verbal theatrics and moments of strange luminous beauty. Davis’ clear unsentimental poems are meditations and mediations on contemporary existence and the unreliability of language, emotions and the memory to gather it all in.”
“As a teacher of creative writing, I am always seeking the balance between rigor—regarding craft, knowledge of the traditions and self criticism—and the pleasures of the unexpected, the ‘unwilled,’ the imagined,” Davis said. “But I believe, too, that to teach writing and literature is also to teach life and living.”
A reception and autograph session will take place after the performance, and books and CDs will be available for purchase. All Reynolds Series readings are free and open to the public.
The fall presentations in the 2010 Reynolds Series will include the following: UNK student Reynolds Scholars, Thursday, Nov. 11, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey on Thursday, Nov. 18. The series features writers from across the United States throughout the year,
