April 03, 2017

Rodney Jones will read poetry collection April 5

Professor Emeritus Rodney Jones returns to the university this week for a reading in celebration of “Village Prodigies,” a poetry collection released this year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

The reading begins at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 5, in the third floor rotunda of Morris Library. There is no admission fee. A reception follows the reading. 

Jones is the author of 11 books of poems, including the collection “Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005,” the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award (1989 for “Transparent Gestures”); and the Harper Lee Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Southeast Booksellers Association Award. He was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. 

Jones teaches in the low-residency master of fine arts of creative writing program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C.