West Essex Elizabeth Michael Boyle Poetry Celebration, featuring Poet and pPaywright Jeanne Murray Walker

The Caldwell College Department of English will present its first Elizabeth Michael Boyle Poetry Celebration, featuring nationally acclaimed poet and playwright Jeanne Murray Walker.

"Celebrate Life, Celebrate Faith, Celebrate Poetry," will take place 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 11, at the Caldwell College Alumni Theatre. Walker has been applauded on campuses from North and South America to Oxford University.  "I aspire to a poetry that is stronger than guns," she says.  "Instead of buying the ready-made words of political operatives, I want to... find new and striking ways to tell what I know of mystery and possibility."

Walker has been featured on radio and public television, and her dramatic scripts have been performed in theaters from the United States to London. A professor of English and creative writing at the University of Delaware, she is co-editor of "Shadow & Light: Literature and the Life of Faith" and for 20 years was poetry editor of Christianity and Literature. Walker is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including "A Deed to the Light" and "Coming into History," and was featured in Best American Poetry in 2009 and in Poetry Magazine's Centennial Anthology.

Walker holds a bachelor's degree in English from Wheaton College in Illinois, amaster's degree from Loyola University in Chicago and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her many awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Atlantic Monthly Fellowship and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.