Acclaimed poet Rathburn to present reading Dec. 3 on campus
11/24/2008
Poet Chelsea Rathburn, whose first full-length collection won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, will present a reading Wednesday, Dec. 3, at Lamar University.
The reading will begin at 7 p.m. in the Dishman Art Museum lecture hall. Sigma Tau Delta, English honor society, will host a reception and book-signing for Rathburn in the art museum after the lecture. Her award-winning poetry collection, “The Shifting Line,” will be available for purchase.
Rathburn’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Criterion, Hudson Review and Pleiades. A marketing writer by trade, she lives in Atlanta. She is a Miami native who earned a master of fine arts from the University of Arkansas.
“The Shifting Line,” published by the University of Evansville Press, has earned praise from fellow poets, being described as “a remarkable debut” and “exceptionally fine and promising.”
“First books by young poets are sometimes praised as showing great promise, and this one does; but in its distinctive marriage of form and feeling, ‘The Shifting Line’ is also a remarkable accomplishment,” said Catherine Tufariello, winner of the 2006 Poets’ Prize. ‘I am happy to have read and reread these poems, and for the new readers who will discover their pleasures.”
Wrote B.H. Fairchild, a finalist for the 1998 National Book Award for Poetry: “The line in Chelsea Rathburn’s exceptionally fine and promising ‘The Shifting Line’ is not only the line of love, traced unflinchingly through its lucid confusions and murky clarities, but also the deeply human pulse of feeling and forms . . . composed from the dissonance of a fully lived life. A remarkable debut.”
Both Tufariello and Fairchild, whose critiques appear on Rathburn’s Web site, have read from their work at Lamar, in 2006 and 2004, respectively.
Rathburn’s reading is open to the public without charge. Additional information is available from R.S. “Sam” Gwynn, professor of English, at (409) 880-8575.
