Memphis poet, educator to give Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series lecture at MSU
Contact: Sasha Steinberg
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Memphis, Tennessee-based poet and educator Marcus Wicker will deliver a public reading Thursday [April 11] as part of the Mississippi State University Department of English’s Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series.
Free to all, Wicker’s presentation begins at 4 p.m. in Mitchell Memorial Library’s John Grisham Room. A public reception and book signing will follow.
Wicker also is scheduled to speak with students in the English department’s Intermediate Poetry class.
Established through an endowment from widow Alice Carol Caldwell and family, the Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series serves as a memorial to Tutweiler native Price Caldwell, who served for more than 20 years as an MSU associate professor of English and died in 2015. He also founded and directed the university’s creative writing program, along with serving as president and vice president for the Southern Literary Festival organization.
Wicker is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, The Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize, as well as fellowships from both Cave Canem and the Fine Arts Work Center. His first collection “Maybe the Saddest Thing” (Harper Perennial) is a National Poetry Series winner and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.
His poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Oxford American and Boston Review. His second book “Silencer”—also an Image Award finalist—was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017 and won the Society of Midland Authors Award, as well as the Arnold Adoff Poetry Award for New Voices. Wicker teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Memphis, and he is the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review. For more, visit http://marcuswicker.com.
Additional information about Wicker’s campus visit and lecture can be obtained from Michael Kardos, MSU associate professor of English and creative writing program co-director, at 662-325-3644 and MKardos@english.msstate.edu.
Learn more about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and its Department of English at www.cas.msstate.edu and www.english.msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.