Alice Notley, a spring 2020 Lenna Visiting Professor at St. Bonaventure University, will read from her poetry during a residency at Jamestown Community College's Jamestown Campus on March 16.
Notley’s poetry reading, which begins at noon in the Weeks Gallery in Sheldon Center, is free and open to the public. She will also visit English classes during her time at JCC.
Notley has become one of America’s greatest living poets. According to her Poetry Foundation profile, Notley has written in narrative, epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience.
She is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including 165 Meeting House Lane, Phoebe Light, Incidentals in the Day World, For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday, Alice Ordered Me to Be Made: Poems 1975, Dr. Williams’ Heiresses, How Spring Comes, which received the San Francisco Poetry Award, Waltzing Matilda, Margaret & Dusty, From a Work in Progress, Homer’s Art, To Say You, Selected Poems of Alice Notley, and The Descent of Alette.
Notley's Mysteries of Small Houses won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection, Disobedience, was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.
Notley’s recent work includes From the Beginning, Alma, or the Dead Women, Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines, Culture of One, Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Benediction, and Certain Magical Acts.
Her newest book, For the Ride, will be published by Penguin in early March.
Active in the New York poetry scene of the 1960s and ’70s, Notley is often identified with the Second Generation New York School poets, though her work resists any period classification.
The Lenna Endowed Visiting Professorship, established in 1990, is funded through gifts from the late Betty S. Lenna Fairbank and Reginald A. Lenna of Jamestown. It is designed to bring scholars of stature in their field to St. Bonaventure University and JCC for public lectures.