2023 O’Brien Poetry Event

We are extremely honored to announce that the O’Brien Poet for 2023 is Maurice Manning from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Annual O’Brien Poetry Event will be held on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 in the University Events Room, 7th Floor of the Glickman Library, Portland. There will be an informal Q&A session from 3:30-4:30 pm and the reading will begin at 5:00 pm. Refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to the public.

Kentucky poet Maurice Manning is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Railsplitter (2019) and Snakedoctor (forthcoming 11/14/23). The Common Man was one of three finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His first collection, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected for the 2000 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems and essays have appeared in TIME, The Sewanee Review, and The New Yorker.