Come to the 11th Annual Robert Creeley Award in the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School auditorium, where poet Bruce Weigl will be presented with the award. Weigl’s early work addresses the horror of his experience in the Vietnam War and his more recent work explores themes of family and childhood. His Buddhist practice influences his compassionate attention to what he terms “ordinary people in extraordinary situations.”
Weigl is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and has also written critical essays, translated Vietnamese and Romanian poetry, and edited several anthologies of war poetry. His awards include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Poet’s Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes. Song of Napalm (1998) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
The Creeley Award was created in honor of Robert Creeley, a major contemporary poet who grew up in West Acton. At his death in March 2005, he was a Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
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Opening poets for the event are the 2011 Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize winners, Soubhik Barari and Emily Sager, both students at ABRHS. The Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize honors Robert Creeley’s late sister, an award-winning student poet who was very close to her brother and encouraged him to write. High school students were invited to submit original poems to be considered for this distinction and Barari and Sager were selected from forty-five student applicants from sixteen high schools.
A book signing session will conclude the evening. The event is free thanks in part to the support of the Acton Memorial Library Foundation, the Friends of the Acton Libraries, and grants from the Acton-Boxborough, Chelmsford, Concord, Littleton and Westford Cultural Councils, local agencies supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a State agency.