Grove City College will welcome acclaimed poet Christian Wiman to campus this spring for the annual Christian Writers Conference.
Wiman, an author and professor of communication arts at Yale Divinity School, will meet with students and faculty, deliver a lecture, and share his work at a reading during the March 26 conference, which is sponsored by the Department of English.
“Christian Wiman is among the most prominent and well-respected Christian poets in America right now,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro, associate professor of English, who recently reviewed the poet’s latest book “Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair” for Front Porch Republic. “His writing on faith and suffering is quite profound,” Bilbro said.
He is the writer, editor, or translator of ten books, including “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.” Wiman’s work reflects his life – including a nearly two decade long battle with lymphoma – his faith, and what it means to be a Christian intellectual in a secular culture.
He will discuss “The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art” in a lecture at 3:30 p.m. in the Great Room of Breen Student Union on campus and read his poetry at 7:30 p.m. in Sticht Lecture Hall of the Staley Hall of Arts and Letters on campus. The lecture and the reading are free and open to the public.
A former Guggenheim Fellow, Wiman has taught at Stanford and Northwestern universities, served as editor of Poetry magazine, and had his work published in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Atlantic Monthly, and numerous other publications. “His poetry and scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader’s surprise and assent are one and the same,” novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote of Wiman’s work.