MCC to Host Award-winning Writer

Middlesex Community College will host award-winning poet, essayist and critic Vijay Seshadri as part of the Visiting Writers Series. The event will take place at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 4 MCC’s Federal Building Assembly Room on the Lowell Campus.

“As writers, as readers, as students and teachers of literature, we are all involved in the protection and cultivation of what is most essential to ourselves, which is our consciousness, which is our awareness of our own being in dynamic relation to others and to society, which in turn is the source of our capacity to assert our moral autonomy and our freedom in the face of all the mindless oppression in the world we live in,” Seshadri said. “This is why literature, and the truth it tells, is so crucial to a healthy society and a living, functioning democracy and humanity.”

Teaching creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Seshadri directs the graduate non-fiction writing program. He has also worked as an editor at The New Yorker.

Awarded The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

An author of five books of poetry, his works include “3 Sections” (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; “The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004), which won the James Laughlin Award; and “Wild Kingdom” (1996). His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review, as well as many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997, 2003, 2006 and 2013.

The MCC Visiting Writers Series is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Office of Student Engagement.

Learn more about MCC's Visiting Writers Series.