The first Visiting Writers Series speaker of this semester for the Millsaps College English Department was distinguished poet Richard Tillinghast. He read from his most recent work of prose, Journeys Into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places (University of Tennessee Press), on February 14 in Room 215 of the Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex. A book signing and reception followed.
Tillinghast is the author of 12 books of poetry but is also an essayist, critic, and travel writer. His world travels have informed his work, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Council, the Irish Arts Council, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Awarded the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship from Harvard, the Ann Stanford Prize for Poetry, and the James Dickey Poetry Prize, he also received the Cleanth Brooks Award for nonfiction from The Southern Review. Among his recent books of poetry are Sewanee Poems and Wayfaring Stranger, and his nonfiction books include Finding Ireland and An Armchaair Traveller’s History of Istanbul.
A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Tillinghast is a graduate of the University of the South and completed his M. A. and Ph. D. at Harvard University. He lives today in Sewanee, Tennessee, and Hawaii.