Gundy to speak about ‘Poetry, the Sleeping King, and Creative Doubt’ on Oct. 21

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S.A. Yoder Lecture: “Poetry, the Sleeping King, and Creative Doubt” by Jeff Gundy
Date and time: Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m.
Location: Goshen College Music Center’s Rieth Recital Hall
Cost: Free and open to the public

Jeff Gundy, an award-winning writer on the cutting edge of poetry and creative nonfiction and a central figure in Mennonite literature, will give a presentation on “Poetry, the Sleeping King, and Creative Doubt” on Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the Goshen College Music Center’s Rieth Recital Hall. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception and book signing. 

An award-winning author of six volumes of poetry and four volumes of essays, Gundy is known for his provocative insights, sense of humor, passion for peace and a Whitmanian sense of inclusiveness in his poems.

A graduate of Goshen College, with a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University, Gundy teaches at Bluffton University, has served as a Fulbright lecturer in Salzburg, Austria, and will spend a semester at LCC International University in Lithuania in the spring of 2015. He has led poetry workshops at Goshen College several times and has twice held the C. Henry Smith Peace Lectureship. His newest work includes an essay on his time in Salzburg as a Fulbright lecturer, “The Other Side of Empire,” forthcoming in The Georgia Review, as well as poems and essays in The Sun, Nimrod, Conrad Grebel Review, Kenyon Review Online, Shenandoah and Kestrel. Recently Gundy has debuted his first CD, “Somewhere Near Defiance.”

Gundy’s recent “Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism and Peace” (Cascadia 2013) explores the field of theopoetics and serves as a sequel to his “Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing” (Cascadia 2005), winner of the Dale E. Brown Award. His sixth full-length collection of poems, “Somewhere Near Defiance” (Anhinga 2014), follows “Spoken Among the Trees” (Akron Poetry Series 2007) and “Deerflies” (WordTech Editions 2003), which won the 2003 Editions Poetry Prize and the 2005 Nancy Dasher Award, given by the College English Association of Ohio for the best book of the year in the creative writing category.

Part creative nonfiction, part historical memoir, part postmodern meditation on the creation of a written voice, his “Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara” (University of Illinois Press 1995) changed the ways in which Mennonites think and write about memory. Along with “Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye” (SUNY Press 2003), and his earlier collections of poetry—“Rhapsody with Dark Matter” (Bottom Dog Press 2000), “Flatlands” (Cleveland State University Press 1995) and “Inquiries” (Bottom Dog Press 1992)—these works formed an innovative foundation for Gundy’s unique and influential role in cultural and literary study.

The S.A. Yoder Lecture Series, begun in 1972, honors Dr. Samuel A. Yoder, a professor at Goshen College from 1930 to 1935 and again from 1946 until his death in 1970. The lecture is sponsored by the Goshen College English Department and the friends and family of S. A. Yoder. For inquiries, contact Ann Hostetler, chair of the English department, at anneh@goshen.edu.