By Charray Reilly
College of Arts & Media
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Department of English, in conjunction with CU Denver Live!, a program of the College of Arts & Media, presents Dan Donaghy, poet, at 4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14 in the King Center Recital.
Described as gritty, racy and authentic, Donaghy’s Streetfighting has been called a blaze of vision, talent, and truth setting fire to a dark urban landscape, and to modern poetry itself. Bruce Weigl, poet and professor at Penn State, says the Philadelphia native possesses, “a precision of diction and an almost impeccable care for words that has the power to lift these poems, and the lives that inhabit them, somehow off of the page, and then deep into our brains.”
Harry Humes, poet and professor, calls the book “a brilliant debut collection.” However, Donaghy is also the author of two chapbooks, Kensington Avenue and Stadium Traffic, both of which also contain the frank, unsentimental adolescent perspective and thematic strength found in his newest release.
About his choice to discuss issues such as poverty, abandonment, and abuse in the context of his childhood home, Donaghy says: “While my writing may be set in Philadelphia or in some other specific place, I hope the hearts alive in the writing are recognizable to readers with all kinds of backgrounds.”
While completing his BA at Kutztown University and his MFA in poetry at Cornell University, Donaghy received fellowships from the national Endowment of the Humanities, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. He has also taught creative writing at SUNY Cortland and Cornell, where he won the John M. and Emily B. Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching.
For more information on the Denver Mint Reading Series, which continues through the spring and features novelists Kent Haruf and Jennifer S. Davis, and poet Philip Levine, please visit www.denverpoetry.org/mint. For more information on this and other UCDHSC College of Arts & Media events, call 303-352-3500 or visit www.cudenver.edu/cam/events.
The event is free and open to the public.