Monday, April 07, 2008
Three-time Poet Laureate will deliver RISC address
 Robert Pinsky will present the keynote address for the seventh annual Vectren RISC Showcase at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10, in Carter Hall in the University Center. The showcase, with research presentations by undergraduate students, will be held Thursday and Friday, April 10-11.Pinsky served an unprecedented three terms as United States Poet Laureate and founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans shared their favorite poems. Gulf Music, his seventh poetry book, was published in 2007. 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 books about poetry include Poetry and the World, nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, The Sounds of Poetry, and Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. His landmark translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. His 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. (He is one of the few members of the Academy to have appeared on The Simpsons.) His poems appear in 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. Pinsky has received the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2006 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Literary Arts. Dr. Jim Durbin, RISC program chair, said he wanted a speaker from the liberal arts for this year’s showcase. “The RISC showcase is about highlighting all kinds of research that can and does occur at our University. We try to introduce someone who exemplifies those characteristics. They’ve done research, they’ve been innovative and creative about how they implemented and ultimately produced good scholarship. That’s the whole premise. After all, this is a liberal arts institution, and it behooves us all to be as broad-based as we can be.” The last three RISC speakers were Greg Marshall, a marine biologist/filmmaker; Dr. Kevin Bassler, a physicist/photographer; and Dr. William Bass, a forensic scientist. The RISC program is designed to encourage independent faculty-guided undergraduate research and creative projects. RISC grants, administered by the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, provide students with funding to initiate or continue such projects, and the RISC Showcase provides an arena for them to present, demonstrate, or display their academic work to fellow students, faculty members, and the public. For more information, contact Durbin at 812/465-1208. |
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