Poet R. S. Gwynn on the Mountain Thursday

On Thursday, Feb. 26, at 4:30 p.m. in the Torian Room of duPont Library, R. S. Gwynn will delight and instruct with his characteristic wit, and this time in verse. Gwynn was last on the Mountain in 2011 to deliver the Aiken Taylor lecture on Billy Collins. A. E. Stallings, a faculty regular at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, describes Gwynn as a “comic genius with a tragic sensibility,” and says that his “mastery seems to encompass nearly every received form known to man, and some of his own invention.” But she saves her greatest praise for Gwynn’s political poetry: “his wit and intelligence let loose on our private foibles and public dysfunction. … In Gwynn we have an ironist worthy of our magnificent failings.”

Poet, editor and critic R. S. (Sam) Gwynn is the author of several poetry collections, including “The Narcissiad,” a book-length satirical poem; “The Drive-in,” which won the Breakthrough Award from the University of Missouri Press; “No Word of Farewell,” his new and selected poems; and the most recent, “Dogwatch.” Of this collection, released in 2015, Joshua Mehigan says, “Gwynn has a neoclassical flair for satire, epigrammatic wit, and refined technique, but without all the silly insistence on good taste and decorum. … the appalling comedy also often yields to moments of real tenderness and poignancy.”

Gwynn’s poetry and criticism appear regularly in the Hudson Review and the Sewanee Review, and he is the editor of the Pocket Anthology Series from Pearson Longman.

Born in Leaksville (now Eden), N.C., Gwynn received a B.A. from Davidson College, where he was the two-time winner of the Vereen Bell Award for Creative Writing. He earned both his M.A. and his M.F.A from the University of Arkansas, where he was the recipient of the John Gould Fletcher Award for Poetry. Gwynn is the winner of the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 1976 Gwynn has taught at Lamar University, where he is the poet-in-residence and university professor of English. 

The reading will be followed by a reception, and Gwynn’s books will be for sale. This reading is supported by the Aiken Taylor fund.