Fall Arts Celebration to feature Pulitzer Prize-winning author

This year's Fall Arts Celebration will feature two unique poetic voices, one of which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Patricia Clark, professor and chair of the Writing Department, said Tracy K. Smith and Oliver de la Paz were selected as the featured authors for this year's poetry night specifically because of their varying career levels and contrasting voices.

"An Evening of Poetry and Conversation with Oliver de la Paz and Tracy K. Smith" will take place Thursday, October 13, at 7 p.m., in the L.V. Eberhard Center (2nd floor). The readings will be followed by a book signing and reception.

Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light, and three books of poetry. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Duende won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body's Question was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. In 2014, the Academy of American Poets awarded Smith with the Academy Fellowship, which is awarded to only one poet each year to recognize distinguished poetic achievement. Smith currently serves as the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in Humanities, and director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.

"Tracy is a nimble poet of variety and her subject matter is various as well, though she's especially fond of using cosmology as a metaphor for life on Earth," said Clark. "Her father was one of the engineers working on the Hubble Space Telescope, and after his death, she devoted a large section of her book Life on Mars to elegizing his life."

A native of the Philippines, Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard and Post Subject: A Fable, winner of the Akron Prize. He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American poetry, and serves on the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. de la Paz is currently an associate professor of English at College of Holy Cross.

"Oliver de la Paz's poetry is admired for its lyricism and range," Clark said. "His dynamic, lavish and intimate work is lyrical and full of imagery and sensory detail."

For more information about all of this year’s Fall Arts Celebration events, visit www.gvsu.edu/fallarts or call (616) 331-2185.