Pennsylvania Poet Harry Humes is Series’ Final Writer
Harry Humes, elder statesman of Pennsylvania poets, will close the 2006 Creative Writer’s Speaker Series at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
Humes will read from his collections at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 19, in the Smith Chapel worship space. A reception for him at 4:30 p.m. in the chapel living room will precede the reading; both are free and open to the public.
A professor emeritus at Kutztown University, Humes has published six collections of poetry, including Butterfly Effect, which was selected for the 1998 National Poetry Series, Ridge Music, and the recent August Evening With Trumpet.
“I first read Ridge Music in 1982, and it’s still one of my favorite books,” George Looney, Penn State Behrend associate professor of English and creative writing, and series coordinator, said. “The poems, though poised and artful, burn, like some Pennsylvania coal fires, under their surfaces, and that burning gives them the power to move us, to break our hearts or raise us up out of the dust.”
Humes is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, several grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His work has been reprinted in The Best American Poetry.
Penn State Behrend’s annual Creative Writer’s Speaker Series is produced by the college’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences with support from the Clarence A. and Eugenie Baumann Smith Fund.
For more information about the series, phone 898-6108.