Poet Cecily Parks (photo provided)
Poet, poetry editor, and creative writing professor Cecily Parks will deliver the annual Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo on Thursday, October 20, from 6:15 to 7:30 p.m. in the Doty Recital Hall. It is free and open to the public.
The title of the lecture is “When I Was Thoreau At Night: A Poem's Pathways to a Life.“
Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O'Nights. Her more recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and teaches in the master of fine arts program in creative writing at Texas State University. She lives in Austin.
Geneseo launched the annual Walter Harding Lecture in 2004 in honor of the late Distinguished Professor Emeritus Walter Harding, who taught in Geneseo’s English department from 1956 to 1982 and was the world's leading scholar on Henry David Thoreau and founding secretary and former president of the Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest international organization devoted to the study of any American author. Among Harding’s seven books on this great American writer, The Days of Henry Thoreau, first published in 1966, stands out as the definitive biography.
Harding's wife, the late Marjorie Brook Harding, created an endowment to make the lecture series possible and significantly enlarged the endowment in 2010, assuring that generations of Geneseo students and faculty will benefit from Walter Harding's tradition of scholarship and learning.