Special Guest: Brendan Galvin

Dr. Brendan J. Galvin, class of '60

Poet
Recipient of the 7th Annual Arts Council Award for Distinguished Achievement

This year the Boston College Arts Council has selected Dr. Brendan Galvin to receive the annual Arts Council Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement in the spring of 2009. He will make a Boston College appearance at the 11th annual Boston College Arts Festival (April 23-25). While on campus Dr. Galvin will participate in a career-related program, Inside the BC Studio, for students exploring a career in film and acting, and will receive the Arts Council award at the annual Alumni Evening at the Arts Festival on Saturday, April 25.

Dr. Brendan J. Galvin is a former English professor and distinguished poet.  He is the author of sixteen collections of poems.  Habitat:  New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 (LSU Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Dr. Galvin was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for Winter Oysters in 1983.  His most recent book is Whirl is King: Poems from a Life List, also published by LSU Press in September 2008.  Dr. Galvin has published over 500 poems in magazines, textbooks and anthologies, and his fiction, critical reviews, and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Crazy Horse, the Laurel Review, Ploughshares, Northwest Review, and Poet Lore.

Dr. Galvin wrote the narration for Massachusetts Story, a one-hour documentary on offshore oil drilling that was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and received a First Prize Documentary at the New England Film Festival.  His translation of Sophocles' Women of Trachis was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1998.

In forty years of college teaching, he has been Wyndham Robertson Visiting Writer in Residence in the MA program at Hollins University, Coal Royalty Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Whichard Chair in the Humanities at East Carolina University.

His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation (England), and Poetry’s Levinson Prize, the first OB Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum and the Sewanee Review’s Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry.

Dr. Galvin graduated from Boston College in 1960 and received both an MFA and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts.  He lives in Truro, Massachusetts with his wife, Ellen.

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