Athens, Ga. – Award-winning poet Scott Cairns will read from his work at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 3, at Hot Corner Café (at the corner of Washington and Hull streets, Athens). The doors will open at 7 p.m. for this event, which is free and open to the public.
Cairns’ visit is sponsored by the Georgia Poetry Circuit, a consortium of schools that has brought some seventy-five nationally known poets to the state over the past twenty-two years. The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia’s acclaimed quarterly journal of arts and letters-now in its sixtieth year of continuous publication-has been the UGA coordinator since the Poetry Circuit’s inception.
Scott Cairns was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1954. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1990. Cairns’ spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, (Harper San Francisco) and a collection of adaptations and translations, Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life (Paraclete Press), will both appear in 2007. Recent poetry collections include Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (Paraclete Press, 2006), Philokalia (Zoo Press, 2002), and Recovered Body (Braziller, 1998). Cairns has published poems in such journals as Poetry, Atlantic Monthly and Paris Review. Cairns received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Cairns is a “comic/apocalyptic poet who … speaks with a serious literate religious conscience” writes interviewer Brent Short, who praises Cairns’ “attempt to recapture the sensual from sacred/secular dichotomies.” Reviewer William Coleman says, “Cairns uses postmodernism in order to avoid ‘soul-crippling cliché’ and ‘glib certainties,’ and to instead find ‘discovered matter,’ poems whose language possesses a sense of surprise and urgency.”
