Join us for a final opportunity to hear Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, one of the world's most prolific playwrights and poets, who this month ends a three-year term as U Alberta's inaugural Distinguished Scholar in Residence.
He has spent six weeks each year teaching intensive poetry and playwriting courses and mentoring staff and students in those disciplines. Walcott, who makes his home in St. Lucia, has written more than 30 plays and 20 poetry collections during a career that started when he published his first poem at age 14.
His writing, which melds a number of genres including mythology and folktales, is rooted in Caribbean post-colonial culture and includes such acclaimed works as Omeros, In a Green Night and 25 Poems. He founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop (1959), which produced many of his early plays, and the Boston Playwrights' Theatre at Boston University (1981), where he was a faculty member until his retirement in 2007.
He has been recognized with several prestigious international awards. Along with the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Walcott has been awarded the St. Lucia Cross, the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play, a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship - the so-called "genius grant" - and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Last Spring he won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for his collection called White Egrets.
