Longtime Gannon University English professor Berwyn Moore will be the featured guest at the 41st annual Gannon Writing Awards program, which will be held at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 18, in the Yehl Ballroom of the Waldron Campus Center.
Students from all three colleges at Gannon will be honored for work they have produced throughout the year, which include poetry, journalism, photography and research.
High school students who won the nationwide high school poetry contest will also be recognized at the program.
Moore, an award-winning poet who has hosted the Awards Night for over 30 years, will highlight the evening reading poetry.
Moore, the first poet laureate of Erie County, has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the 2015 James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points Journal.
Beth Gylys, an English professor at Georgia State University, offered high praise for one of Moore’s books of poetry, “Sweet Herbaceous Miracle,” saying that it “celebrates the profligate complexities of the human condition and natural world.”
On a promotional poster for the Writing Awards event, Gylys was quoted as saying that “Moore’s sumptuous linguistic gifts, observant eye and deftly wielded ironic sensibility are at work in full force here, teasing out the confounding but also rewarding. Hers is a voice that surprises and gratifies at every turn.”
Moore and Carol Hayes, an English department ins tructor, also will present an afternoon seminar titled “Illness: Surviving, then Thriving with Words” at 3 p.m. in Room 3200 of the Palumbo Academic Center.
Some of Moore’s books will be available for purchase after the awards event.
In addition, free copies of the 2018 Totem, Gannon’s award-winning literary magazine, will be available. Those with questions about Totem are encouraged to contact Shreelina Ghosh, Ph. D., an assistant professor in the English department, at [email protected].

BRANDON JACES
[email protected]