Award-winning poet Adrian Matejka will be on Wofford College’s campus on Tuesday, Oct. 28, as part of the college’s Writer Series. He will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the Olin Teaching Theater in the Franklin W. Olin Building.
The program is free and open to the public.
Matejka’s most recent book, “The Big Smoke,” was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Matejka, a native of Nuremberg, Germany, is the winner of the Julia Peterkin Award and the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared in “American Poetry Review,” “The Best American Poetry 2010,” “Gulf Coast,” “Ploughshares,” “Poetry,” and “Prairie Schooner,” among other journals and anthologies.
A graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Matejka teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and currently is working on a new collection of poems and a graphic novel. His first collection of poems, “The Devil’s Garden,” won the 2002 New York/New England Award from Alice James Books. His second collection, “Mixology,” was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature – Poetry.
The Wofford Writers Series has been an important resource for the Wofford literary community since 1984. Since then it has brought to campus four or five writers each year, ranging from the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney to the bestselling novelist Ron Rash, all of whom read from their works and meet informally with students, faculty and guests. These writers provide an insider’s understanding of the literary process and inspiration for all who put words on a page.