Special Collections Events page

Modern Literature Audio Archive

The series began in the Fall of 2000 with the purpose of celebrating the careers and influence of authors in the Modern Literature Collection. We invite local and visiting writers to read selections of the featured author's work and of their own.

Donald Finkel, Poet-In-Residence emeritus from Washington Univeristy has produced a sizable body of innovative poetry in his career whcih spans almost fifty years. Much of his teaching career has been at Washington University where he developed the Writers' Program with his wife, Constance Urdang. He has also taught at the University of Iowa, Bard College, and Bennington College. His recent books include A Question of Seeing and Beyond Despair . He has an essay in the collection Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem. 

Jane O. Wayne is the author of Looking Both Ways , selected by David Wagoner for the 1988 Devins Award and A Strange Heart selected by James Tate for the 1995 Marianne Moore Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry , Iowa Review , Ploughshares , The Massachusetts Review , The American Scholar , The Michigan Quarterly Review , Ascent , Poetry Northwest , and other magazines. She has taught creative writing at Washington University and Webster University in St. Louis.

Kent Shaw is a graduate of the University of Missouri-St.Louis, and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Washington University. He has written articles for The Common Space and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , and his poems have appeared in Word Virtual and on the spoken word CD, Distilled Muse .