Award-winning poet gives reading, lecture at Cornell

MOUNT VERNON — Award-winning poet Rosanna Warren will give a reading at Cornell College and lead an informal discussion on “The Nature of Poetic Influence,” covering the ancient, modern and contemporary poetry that has influenced her, at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 13, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Warren, the Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, is the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar to Cornell. Among more than 3,600 U.S. colleges and universities, Cornell is one of only 270 with a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most select honorary society in the United States.

Warren has written four poetry collections: “Departure,” “Stained Glass” (Lamont Poetry Selection, American Academy of Poets), “Each Leaf Shines Separate” and “Snow Day”; translated Euripides’ “Suppliant Women”; and edited several books, among them “The Art of Translation.” She received the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize and the Award of Merit for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

During her two-day campus visit, Warren also will visit with students in a creative writing class; meet with the Wordsmiths, Cornell’s student creative writing club; and talk about the life of a poet over pizza and soda pop with English majors and minors.

This is the 51st year of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program, which has sent 529 scholars on 4,450 visits to member campuses since the 1956-57 academic year. The purpose of the program is to allow an exchange of ideas between the visiting scholars and the resident faculty and students, contributing to the intellectual life on campus.

Additional sponsors of Warren’s visit are the Cornell College Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa; the Lecture, Artists, Cultural Events Consortium; the President’s Office; and the English department.