As part of its In Celebration of Books program, distinguished poet A. Van Jordan will be visiting The Gunston School on Thursday, February 18, 2016. The event will kick off with a poetry reading at 8:30 a.m., which is open to the the public. Jordan will then conduct workshops with Gunston students throughout the day.
The Cineaste, Jordan’s latest collection of poetry, has been widely hailed as innovative in its approach and draws from his own love of film as a means of exploring the intersection of the personal, historical, and cultural. A review by Sean Singer in The Rumpus observed that “Jordan’s true subject is the historical understanding that comes from film, the uses of film in bearing witness, and the possibilities for innovation in using poetry to write about cinema.”
Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). He is the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at Rutgers University-Newark, and he serves on the faculty of The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
The reading will take place in Gunston’s Field House, and copies of Jordan’s books will be available afterward for purchase in The Alice R. Ryan Family Library, located in Everdell Hall.
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