A Celebration of Learning

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Featuring: Jay Parini

3:30 p.m. • Swang Center, Room 108

Jay Parini is the Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he also directs the Creative Writing Program. He is an acclaimed American poet, biographer, novelist, and essayist.

In addition to six novels, he has authored biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. He has received the Chicago Tribune-Heartland Award for the best work of nonfiction in 2000, the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002, and the Hale Medal for Literature in 2003.

His latest book of poetry, his fourth, is The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems, published by George Braziller. He has edited numerous works including the Norton Anthology of American Autobiography, The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, and the recent four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature.

All of the above accomplishments speak to a prolific literary life, but Dr. Parini has also spent three decades teaching English to college students. The Art of Teaching, published by Oxford University Press, is an intimate memoir that brims with encouragement, humor, and wisdom as he offers glimpses into the teacher’s craft. The small book not only recounts some triumphs, but it brings a fresh and honest look at the trials and the errors one encounters in a teaching career. Dr. Parini’s teaching and writing career is a supreme example of an academic who lives in a continual state of awakening the mind.

Recent books

The Art of Teaching, by Jay Parini. Oxford University Press, 2005.

One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, by Jay Parini. HarperCollins, 2004.

The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems, by Jay Parini. George Braziller, 2005.