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Westminster College to Host Award-Winning Writer

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Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2000

Gary Gildner, winner of the 1996 Iowa Poetry Prize, will speak at Westminster College Thursday, Oct. 5, at 8 p.m. in Wallace Memorial Chapel as part of the Bleasby Colloquium.

Gildner's works include eight volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a novel, and a memoir, The Warsaw Sparks. Many of his poems in his award winning book, The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, come from the year that he and his wife lived in Slovakia during the breakup of Czechoslovakia. In this year of heightened excitement and uncertainty, the couple lived in a cement box of a flat like thousands of others.

"I write, I work, I do with a pencil," said Gildner. "I like how the words come out of my head and travel down my arm to that sharp point."

This colloquium is the first in a series of four scheduled for the George Bleasby Colloquia, a series of literary events in honor of Bleasby, who chaired the Department of English at Westminster from 1954-75.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Westminster College Department of English at (724) 946-7342.