Guest Poet Tom Sleigh — A Conscientious Objector with a Very Seared Conscience
November 2, 2018
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities Stevenson Hall, Lower Level
Address
701 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60612
Calendar
Download iCal File‘In a letter, Wilfred Owen once described himself as "a conscientious objector with a very seared conscience." That description seems to accurately describe what I've often felt as a journalist and poet, who by writing about refugees, inevitably finds himself writing about mental and physical wounds. So by looking back at World War I poets like Wilfred Owen and David Jones, I'll explore what's at stake in learning how to speak the language of the wound in our contemporary world.’ -- Tom Sleigh
Tom Sleigh is a nationally renowned poet, Distinguished Professor in the MFA program at Hunter College, NY, and works as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He is the author of several books of poetry; his most recent collections include Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. His most recent books, published as companion pieces, are The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees, and a volume of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin, both published by Graywolf in 2018. Sleigh has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Threepenny, and elsewhere, and has been widely anthologized in publications such as The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Travel Writing.
Date posted
Oct 8, 2018
Date updated
Oct 8, 2018