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Yale Literature and Spirituality Series 2009-2010


Winner

 

Troeger

 

Pinsky

      

 

Other Events

 

 

Readings followed by a book-signing and a reception

Marquand Chapel

Presented in collaboration with Yale Divinity Student Book Supply

 

Lauren Winner

Assistant Professor of Christian Spirituality, Duke University

December 2  Wednesday

3:30 PM

Marquand Chapel

Lauren F. Winner is the author of three books, Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. She has appeared on PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Books and Culture, and Christianity Today. Winner has degrees from Duke, Columbia, and Cambridge universities, and holds a Ph.D. in history. The former book editor for Beliefnet, Lauren teaches at Duke Divinity School, and lives in Durham, North Carolina. Lauren travels extensively to lecture and teach, and during the academic year of 2007-2008, she is a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. (While there, she's revising her dissertation, which examines household religious practice in eighteenth-century Virginia, for publication.) When she’s home, you can usually find her curled up, on her couch or screen porch, with a good novel.

 

Thomas Troeger

A J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor of Christian Communication, Yale University

Poetry reading and hymn singing

February 2  Tuesday

5:30 PM

Marquand Chapel

Professor Troeger has written eighteen books in the fields of preaching, poetry, hymnody and worship and is a frequent contributor to journals dedicated to these topics. His most recent books include Preaching and Worship, Preaching While the Church Is Under Reconstruction, Above the Moon Earth Rises: Hymn Texts, Anthems and Poems for a New Creation, and God, You Made All Things for Singing: Hymn texts, anthems and poems for a new millennium. He is also a flutist and a poet whose work appears in the hymnals of most denominations and is frequently set as choral anthems. For three years Professor Troeger hosted the Season of Worship broadcast for Cokesbury, and he has led conferences and lectureships in worship and preaching throughout North America, as well as in Denmark, Holland, Australia, Japan, and Africa. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1970 and in the Episcopal Church in 1999, he is dually aligned with both traditions. He is a former president of the Academy of Homiletics and currently serves as the co-president of Societas Homiletica, the international guild of scholars in homiletics. He is also the national chaplain to the American Guild of Organists.

 

Robert Pinsky

United States Poet Laureate (1997–2000), Translator, Essayist, and Teacher

The Lana Schwebel Memorial Lecture in Religion and Literature

February 18  Thursday

5:30 PM

Marquand Chapel

Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such national enthusiasm in response, that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world. 

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky became a public ambassador for poetry, founding the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans — of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state — shared their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry had a vigorous presence in the American cultural landscape. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry. The anthology Americans’ Favorite Poems, which include letters from project participants, is in its 18th printing.  The most recent anthology, An Invitation to Poetry, comes with a DVD featuring 27 of the FPP video segments, as seen on PBS. In April 2009, WW Norton will publish Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud; a CD will accompany the book.

Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and ambitious range. His book Gulf Music (FSG, fall 2007) is his seventh volume of poetry. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union.  His most recent chapbook is entitled First Things to Hand (Sarabande, May 2006).  He is also the author of Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (University of Chicago Press, March 2009).

Pinsky’s books about poetry include Poetry and the World, nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, The Sounds of Poetry, and more recently, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. He contends that, though intimate, poetry addresses cultural needs by communicating a shared set of social meanings, a paradox that becomes part of his effort to demonstrate the complexity of American poetry.

Robert Pinsky’s landmark, best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Pinsky’s prose book, The Life of David, is a lively retelling and examination of the David stories, narrating a wealth of legend as well as scripture.

The poetry editor for the online magazine Slate, for seven years Pinsky appeared regularly on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He writes the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post. He was elected in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and frequently in The Best American Poetry anthologies. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. Robert Pinsky is also the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2006 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Literary Arts, and the 2008 Theodore M. Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. He is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on “The Simpsons.”

The Schwebel Lecture is dedicated to the memory of former ISM faculty member Lana Schwebel.

 

 

 

 
         
     

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