Award-winning Emerson Professor to Speak to Middlesex CC Students

Middlesex Community College will host poet, translator, essayist and scholar Daniel Tobin as part of the college’s Visiting Writers Series at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, March 1 in the Lowell Campus Federal Building Assembly Room.

“The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of a person into activity,” Tobin said, paraphrasing Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Talking and teaching about writing should aim for that ideal which is – since no person is an island – also the basis for genuine and just community.”

A professor at Emerson College, Tobin has published eight books of poem, including “Blood Labors” (Four Way Books, 2018) and “The Stone in the Air,” translations of poems by Paul Celan (Salmon Poetry, 2018). He has published two collections of essays, “On Serious Earth” (Orison Books, 2019) and “Awake in America: On Irish American Poetry” (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2011).

Tobin’s poetry and essays have appeared in national and international journals and magazines, including The Harvard Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and Poetry Ireland Review. He has also been featured in The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets and The Norton Introduction of Poetry, among others.

He has edited four anthologies, including To The Many: Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge (Quale Press, 2008), which received a Special Commendation from the UK Poetry Society. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (U. of Kentucky Press) came out in 1999.

MCC Visiting Writers Series is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Office of Student Engagement.