Poet Liam Rector to read from works as part of Visiting Writers Series

Celebrated poet Liam Rector will read from his works Oct. 16 at 7:30 p.m. in Wilson Hall Room 126 as part of the Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series.

The Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the English department and is made possible through an endowment fund.

"Vanderbilt has been able to bring very prominent, current writers to campus to either give readings or teach for a semester," English Professor Mark Jarman noted.

Past writers who have come to Vanderbilt as part of the series include Eudora Welty, James Dickey, Pauline Kael and Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Levine.

Rector, a Guggenheim fellow and a National Endowment of the Arts grant recipient, is the author of two books of poetry, "The Sorrow of Architecture" (1984) and "American Prodigal" (1994), and the editor of "The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall" (1987).

Rector has administered literary programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Associated Writing Programs, the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he directs the Graduate Writing Seminars and the Summer Writing Workshops at Bennington College. An outspoken NEA defender and active member of the Freedom-to-Write Committee of PEN New England, Rector is also poetry editor of Harvard Magazine.

Rector's poems, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in Paris Review, Partisan Review, The New Republic, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, The Reaper and others.

Rector holds master's degrees from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He lives in Somerville, Mass. with his wife, Tree Swenson, a literary consultant and book designer.