The internationally renowned poet Coleman Barks, a longtime Athenian and professor emeritus of English at UGA, will give a reading of his work as part of UGA's 2024 Spotlight on the Arts festival. Lisa Starr, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Rhode Island, will read from her work as well. Hawkes Corbett, a fourth-year English major at UGA, will give an introduction of Barks.
The event, which is free and open to the public with no registration required, is presented by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts in partnership with The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia Press, the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, the University of Georgia Libraries, the department of English, the Creative Writing Program, and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Barks received a BA from the University of North Carolina and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to the University of North Carolina to earn a PhD.
In 1976, poet Robert Bly introduced Barks to the work of 13th-century Sufi mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi. Barks has since translated more than a dozen volumes of Rumi’s poetry, including The Illuminated Rumi (1997) and The Essential Rumi (1995), often in collaboration with Persian scholar John Moyne. Barks’s translation work was the focus of an episode of Bill Moyers’s PBS series "The Language of Life," and he has collaboratively produced his Rumi translations with music and dance ensembles including the Paul Winter Consort and Zuleikha. In 2004 Barks received the Juliet Hollister Award for his work supporting interfaith understanding, and in 2006 the University of Tehran awarded Barks an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contributions to the field of Rumi translation. Barks’s translations are noted for their accessible lyricism.
Barks’s own poetry, influenced by Wordsworth, Whitman, and Rilke, is lyrical, meditative, and steeped in his native Southeastern landscape. Barks has published numerous original poetry collections, including Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems (2008), Gourd Seed (1993), and The Juice (1971). Awards for his poetry include the Guy Owen Prize from the Southern Literary Review, and the New England Review’s prize for narrative poetry.
Barks lives in Athens, Georgia, and is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Georgia. In 2009 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame.
Lisa Starr is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Rhode Island and a two-time recipient of the Rhode Island Fellowship in Poetry. She founded the Block Island Poetry Project and served as its director for thirteen years. Starr has published three full-length collections of poetry including Mad With Yellow (2008), and she co-edited Where Beach Meets Ocean, an anthology celebrating ten years of the BIPP, in 2013.