News & Events 2005-2006

Poetry Fest Comes to Campus

The Fourth Biennial Warren County Poetry Festival took place on the Blair campus on Saturday, October 1. Many Blair students and teachers
participated and helped make the day a success. The fest is a biannual event presented free of charge by the Warren County Cultural & Heritage Commission, in partnership with Blair Academy and the Warren County
Freeholders. The poetry program is made possible in part by a special
projects grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department
of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Numerous poets, including Hayden Carruth, Jean Valentine and Gerald Stern, attended the festival, giving readings, teaching workshops and signing books. Hayden Carruth has published more than 30 books, including Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Doctor Jazz: Poems 1996-2000 (2001); Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays (1998); and Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1996), recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry.

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her most recent collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Gerald Stern, New Jersey’s first poet laureate, is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award for This Time: New and Selected Poems; the Lamont Prize; fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He taught at many universities, including Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Pittsburgh. Until his retirement in 1995, Stern taught at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City. His most recent books are Everything is Burning (2005), Not God After All (2004), What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes from a Life (2004), and American Sonnets (2002).

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