Distinguished Visiting Writer to read at PSU

  Tuesday, September 25, 2018 11:00 AM
  People and Society, Campus Culture, News, Arts & Entertainment

Pittsburg, KS

Poet and essayist Elizabeth Dodd will reading from her own work at 8 p.m. on Oct. 4 in the Governors Room in the Overman Student Center. The event is free, and is sponsored by the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series and the Student Fee Council. A reception will follow.  

While Dodd publishes essays on the environment and academic work in the field of ecocriticism, she’ll be reading from her poetry on her visit. Like her other writings, the subject of nature greatly informs her poetry, which explores the relationship between the human and the more-than-human worlds.  

“Elizabeth Dodd's poems paint wonderfully rich portraits of the natural environment while also exploring the human response to the physical world,” said Christopher Anderson, associate professor in Creative Writing. “What really draws me to her work, though, is the language she uses: vivid words and phrases that simply sound wonderful, bright and evocative like the chiming of a bell.” 

Dodd’s poetry books include Archetypal Light and Like Memory, Caverns, which one the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award. She teaches creative writing and literature at Kansas State University. Her latest book is a work of creative nonfiction, Horizon’s Lens.  

She's also the author of In the Mind’s Eye: Essays Across the Animate World, which won the Best Creative Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 2009; Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes, winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Best Nonfiction Book Award in 2003; and the critical book The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck.  

She has been a resident at artists’ colonies (Yaddo, The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow), a research station (Mount St. Helens), and a national monument (Chaco Culture National Historical Park).