Award-winning poet visits campus

Ars Poetica features award-winning poet

Jan. 24, 2020 LA GRANDE, Ore. –  Eastern Oregon University’s Carl and Sandra Ellston Ars Poetica Literary Reading Series returns Feb. 4, featuring award-winning poet Chad Sweeney. Sweeney will read selections from his work at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 4 in Pierce Library.

Sweeney is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at California State University-San Bernardino and holds a Master of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University and a doctorate from Western Michigan University. 

Sweeney’s “Little Million Doors: An Elegy” won the 2019 Nightboat Poetry Prize, and has been reviewed by Kazim Ali as “perhaps ghostly but never disembodied, these lyrics feel immediate, necessary and absolutely brand new. Though elegiac, they are ever hopeful and affirming and alive.”

Sweeney writes of his new collection, “I merely write perceptions, compositions in motion, textures, contrasts, distances, sounds, frames, traceries, and scatterings as if the world were a cubist painting or sculpture garden. From these prima causa observations — and in a state of gratitude and excited receptivity — the words begin to rise or fracture into liminal spaces quivering with mystery and potential.”

His published work also includes “Parable of Hide and Seek,” “Arranging the Blaze,” “White Martini of the Apocalypse,” “Wolf’s Milk: the Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney,” and “An Architecture.” Additionally, he has translated H.E. Sayeh’s “The Art of Stepping through Time.”

Sweeney’s reading is free and open to the public. Copies of his books will be available for purchase and signing after the reading. 

For more information about this and other visiting writer events, contact David Axelrod at daxelrod@eou.edu.

Written by PR Intern Briana Rosenkranz.