Centenary poets to offer reading at Meadows Museum November 12
SHREVEPORT, LA — Emily Leithauser and David Havird, both faculty members in the Department of English at Centenary and both published poets, will give a joint poetry reading at the College’s Meadows Museum of Art on Monday, November 12. The event begins at 5:00 p.m. with a wine and cheese reception followed by the reading from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The reception and reading are free and open to the public, and is generously underwritten by the Attaway Professorships in Civic Culture program.
The event is entitled “Out with the Old, In with the New,” a reference to Leithauser’s recent arrival at Centenary and Havird’s 30 years of service to the College. Leithauser joined the English faculty in August 2018 and Havird will complete his last semester of teaching in fall 2018.
“I’m delighted to be able to read on the same program with Emily Leithauser,” says Havird. “I had been reading her poems – admiringly – for some time before she applied for the positon at Centenary. At least occasionally, we had poems in the same magazine. She’s one of the best young poets around, with a sophisticated appreciation for the craft of verse composition and a sensitivity especially to the nuances of personal relationships, which a lot of her poems explore.”
Leithauser is the author of The Borrowed World, which won the 2015 Able Muse Book Award. A widely published poet and scholar, she has had poems and articles appear in The Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, Southwest Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where her teachers included Derek Walcott and Rosanna Warren, and a PhD from Emory University where she studied under Jericho Brown.
David Havird, who joined the Centenary English faculty in 1988 after earning his PhD at the University of Virginia, is the author of two verse collections, Map Home (2013) and Penelope's Design (2010), which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. His new book, Weathering: Poems and Recollections, is slated for publication in 2020 by Mercer University Press. He is also the author of many articles, including "In and Out of Class with James Dickey," about his undergraduate mentor at the University of South Carolina.
For more information about the reception and reading, contact David Havird at dhavird@centenary.edu.