Contact: Kenneth Billings
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Poet and essayist Sherod Santos will launch the 2010-11 Distinguished Speaker series with a reading of his collective works of poetry on Oct. 7.
Sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities, the free program will begin at 4 p.m. in the Swalm suite on the fourth floor of the Swalm Chemical Engineering Building and is open to the public. A book signing and reception will follow.
A native of Greenville, S.C., Santos is the author of numerous published collections of poetry including his most recent, The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems, and The Pilot Star Elegies, which garnered him a Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, was a National Book Award finalist and nominee for the New Yorker Book Award.
His many honors include Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill fellowships, and Pushcart prizes. In 1999, he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Santos earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at San Diego State University and is currently a professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
For more information, contact Arts and Sciences Dean Gary Myers at 662-325-8071 or gmyers@deanas.msstate.edu.