by Rachel Williams
The University of West Georgia hosted a poetry reading by award-winning poet Rosanna Warren on Friday, November 1, at 7 p.m. The reading was held in the Kathy Cashen Recital Hall in the Humanities building. The event, which was free and open to the public, was sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy and the Creative Writing Program.
On October 31, Rosanna was also a panelist at a College of Arts and Humanities symposium on The Shape of the Humanities in Higher Education. Her status as an endowed professor at the University of Chicago made her a valued member of the panel. On the Friday night poetry reading, Rosanna read poems reflecting on her childhood in Europe, her mother’s death and her distaste for war and Wall Street. She also read poems about schizophrenia and the life of a fictional drug addict, the latter of which prompted her to laughingly inform the audience that not all of her poems were autobiographical.
Opening for Rosanna was UWG instructor Amy Pence, who wrote “Amor Amor” and “The Decadent Lovely.” Her poems have been featured in places such as The Oxford American, The Antioch Review, Poets and Writers, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Amy read select poems that had been inspired by Rosanna’s.
