Award-winning author to read, discuss works Nov. 5
By Jeffrey Romagni : November 3rd, 2009
Hurd
Dr. Barbara Hurd, author and professor of creative writing at Frostburg State University, will read and discuss her works Thursday, Nov. 5, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. in Wolfe Hall Room 1205 on Main Campus.
Her free, public talk, “On the Fecundity of Limits: Readings and Remarks,” will showcase her personal essays and poetry as part of The University of Toledo’s Science and Sensibility Series.
Hurd’s award-winning essays are reflections inspired by her experiences in natural environments and have appeared in numerous journals, including Best American Essays, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Orion and Audubon, among others. She has written several books, including Objects in This Mirror, Entering the Stone, and Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs and Human Imagination.
“Her rich, pleasurable and thought-provoking essays lead us to reflect upon imagination, creativity, and our connections to the unbuilt environment,” said Dr. Charles Blatz, UT professor of philosophy. “These writings are invitations to investigate the creative process and its place in both our everyday life and our relationships within the environments where we are embedded.”
Blatz said Hurd’s title poem in a collection, The Singer’s Temple, makes reference to an ancient Greek practice of erecting temples at crossroads so those on a journey can stop and sort their direction. “She applies this to the various paths of our reflective journeys suggesting that there are no fixed and final means of directing this traffic of thought,” he said. “Intersection of divergent paths is inevitable. But then, thinking of the travelers’ rest, she suggests that these meetings give rise to conversations that mutually inform and enrich.
“The Science and Sensibility Series has aspired to such an idea. Bring together those whose disciplines place them in science, technology, medicine and mathematics to engage in reflection with those whose disciplines place them in the humanities, the arts and related areas of the social sciences. Provide an opportunity for intellectual engagement. Conversation, mutual challenge, understanding, intellectual community, personal integration of ideas can all rise out of such meetings.
“Barbara Hurd’s visit will create a perfect meeting place as we stop in our intellectual travels and sort our direction,” Blatz said.
Hurd was the recipient of a 2002 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction and winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award and Pushcart Prizes in 2004 and 2007.
Her talk for the Science and Sensibility Series is sponsored by the Office of the Main Campus Provost through a Program Academic Excellence Award.