Athens, Ga. – Author, translator and essayist Andrew Schelling will read from his work on Tuesday, Nov. 2, at 7:30 p.m. at Ciné BarCaféCinéma, located 235 West Hancock Ave. in Athens. The event, sponsored by the University of Georgia English department as part of its Lanier Speakers Series, is free and open to the public.
Schelling’s writings are known for their ecological focus and engagement with the poetic traditions of Asia. He has authored or edited 18 books, most recently a collection of poetry, Old Tale Road (Empty Bowl Press). He also has revised a second edition of Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India (White Pine, 2008), a volume that received the Academy of American Poets award for translation when it originally appeared in 1992.
Schelling’s other volumes of translation include For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai (1993, revised edition 1998) and The Cane Groves of Narmada River: Erotic Poems from Old India (City Light Books, 1998).
His collections of essays and poems include Wild Form, Savage Grammar: Poetry, Ecology, Asia (2003), Tea Shack Interior: New & Selected Poetry (2001), The Road to Ocosingo (1998), Old Growth: Poems and Notebooks 1986-1994 (1995), The India Book: Essays & Translations from Indian Asia (1993), and Moon Is a Piece of Tea (1993). He is the editor of The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom, 2005), which presents the writings of 30 contemporary Buddhist-influenced poets.
Schelling grew up in New England’s Transcendentalist country. He moved west to Northern California in 1973 where he explored wilderness regions of the Coast Range and Sierra Nevadas and studied Sanskrit and Asian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. An ecologist, naturalist and explorer of wilderness areas, he has traveled extensively in North America, Europe, India and the Himalayas. In 1990, he relocated to Colorado to join the faculty at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School where he teaches poetry, Sanskrit and wilderness writing. He lives in Boulder along the front range of the Southern Rocky Mountains.
The Lanier Speaker Series-inaugurated in 2001 by Jed Rasula, the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at UGA-brings visiting artists, authors and scholars to campus. The mission of the series is to enrich the intellectual life of the campus, to extend the English department’s outreach to the academic community, to enhance interdisciplinary discourse and to engage alumni and Athens residents with an annual series of stimulating lectures. Previous speakers on the Lanier Series include Jondi Keane, Louis Menand, Paul Muldoon, Marjorie Perloff, Ed Sanders, Lyn Hejinian, Robert O’Meally, Alice Notley and Fredric Jameson.
