Awarding-winning poet to give reading at SAU

On Wednesday, Feb. 21, Spring Arbor University will host award-winning poet and scholar James Matthew Wilson for a poetry reading. Wilson will give his reading at 7 p.m. in the Prop Shop on SAU’s campus, located at 106 E. Main St., Spring Arbor, MI 49283. The event will be free and open to the public.

Last year, Wilson received The Hiett Prize in the Humanities, “an annual award of $50,000 aimed at identifying candidates who are in the early stages of careers devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.” Dana Gioia, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has praised Wilson’s work, writing, “Wilson’s poems display a rare degree of skill and ambition, but he is never content with mere virtuosity, always reaching for spiritual and emotional intensity.”

Wilson’s poetry seeks to recover a theological grounding for beauty and truth within our broken culture. His poems embody the disciplined desire that is at the heart of the Christian life. They lovingly describe the stuff of our everyday lives, helping us to see the beauty of eternity that shines within mundane reality.

James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He earned his B.A. at the University of Michigan and his M.F.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame. His two most recent books are Some Permanent Things and The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition.