The Hurst Professorship
An endowed chair, the Hurst Visiting Professorship brings to campus annually four or more distinguished writers. In addition to presenting readings and lectures, these visitors are particularly accessible to students in the Writing Program through one-on-one and group meetings. Recent Hurst Professors have included poets Frank Bidart, Louise Gluck, Linda Gregerson, Lyn Hejinian, Heather McHugh, Arthur Sze and Jay Wright and fiction writers Amy Bloom, Tony Earley, Amy Hempel, Michael Martone, Hilary Mantel, Sigrid Nunez and Joy Williams.
The Hurst Professorship is made possible by a bequest of the novelist Fannie Hurst, an alumna of Washington University. The Hurst Professors are in residence either for a one or two-week period, during which they visit classes, give public lectures and readings, and are accessible to students interested in their field, or for the whole semester, in which case they also offer an upper division course (for example, Leonard Barkan's "Intertextuality and the Anatomy of Art in the Renaissance," Helen Vendler's "Problems in the Interpretation of Poetry," Joseph McElroy's "Modern Fiction").
Fall 2009 Hurst Professors
Rikki Ducornet is the author of seven novels, three collections of short fictions including The One Marvelous Thing, a collection of essays and five books of poetry. She has received a Lannan Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award for fiction and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her paintings have been exhibited widely, most recently at the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago, Chile.
Claudia Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry, including PLOT, The End of the Alphabet, Nothing in Nature is Private, which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize, and, most recently Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. She was the 2005 recipient of the James Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poetry for distinguished poetic achievement. Tonight, Professor Rankine lectures on the craft of poetry.