Author Paul Dimond will participate in this symposium at the Michigan Union, as a part of three-day “Spring Festival Celebration of UM Bicentennial." The morning panel of the Poetry Symposium will be on how Robert Frost, President Burton and the Hopwood Awards showed the way to make a place for poets and other creative writers in higher education.  Other panel participants include Donald Sheehy, chief editor of The Letters of Robert Frost, and Nicholas Delbanco, the Emeritus Robert Frost Professor of English and former Director of the Hopwood Program.  After lunch the second panel on “The Middle Years” will include readings from other Michigan poets (including Ted Roethke, Wystan Auden and Robert Hayden, also characters in The Belle of Two Arbors).  The third panel on “Contemporary Michigan Voices” will include readings by three current award-winning poets Laura Kasischke, Tarfia Faizullah, and Vievee Francis.  The next evening evening, the author will be a part of the permanent lighting of the carillon of the Burton Memorial Tower — which like President Burton and the opening of the Tower in December 1936 — also play prominent roles in his novel.

Read the UM Bicentennial Symposium, “Poets at Michigan: Then and Now” blog posting for a recap and the full notes from this event, as well as view the video shown.