Award-Winning Poet Coming to Westminster College

Award-winning poet and 1967 Westminster College graduate Jack Ridl will speak Thursday, Oct. 19, at 7 p.m. in Sebastian Mueller Theater in the McKelvey Campus Center.

"Jack Ridl is a blue collar poet hiding out as a college professor," said Dr. James Perkins, Westminster College professor of English. "He gets up every day, grabs his lunch bucket and heads off toward the word mine. What he finds there enriches us all."

Ridl grew up in both the world of basketball, where his father was a well-known head coach at Westminster College and the University of Pittsburgh, and in the world of the circus inherited from his mother's family.

Conrad Hilberry has written, "one group of poems is unmatched, I believe, anywhere in American Poetry. I mean the sports poems. These bring to the world of Midwestern high school basketball the sort of authority, the sure nuance and detail that the movie Bull Durham brings to minor league baseball. They are so compelling, so varied, so familiar to anyone who knows high school and sports that they may well introduce a new genre."

Ridl's new collection, Broken Symmetry was published in 2006 by Wayne State University. He is also the author of two other full-length collections: Outside the Center Ring, a collection of circus poems; and Against Elegies, which was selected by Sharon Dolin and former U.S. Poet Laureate Bill Collins for the 2001 Chapbook Award from The Center for Book Arts in New York City.

Ridl, who has taught at Hope College for 36 years and founded the college's Visiting Writers Series, has published over 300 poems in more than 60 literary magazines including Poetry East, Harpur Palate, The Georgia Review and others. His work has been in a dozen anthologies, and he has given more than 100 readings.

In 1996, The Carnegie Foundation named Ridl "Michigan Professor of the Year. He was chosen by the Hope College students for the "HOPE Award" given to "Hope's Outstanding Professor Educator," and Hope's student body also chose him "Favorite Professor in 2003." Ridl has twice been asked by students to give the college's commencement address.

Contact Perkins at (724) 946-7347 or e-mail jperkins@westminster.edu for more information

Jack Ridl