A List
7/21/03

SLU PROFESSOR RETURNS FROM WRITING RESIDENCY

CANTON – St. Lawrence University Professor of Modern Lanugages and Literatures 
Steven F. White has returned from a month-long residency in Marfa, Texas, made 
possible by a grant from the Lannan Foundation, a private family foundation.
	The residency program provides uninterrupted writing time for poets, 
writers, essayists, scholars, art curators, and activists. Residency durations 
are usually from two weeks to three months. Inaugurated in 1998 with two houses 
in Galisteo, New Mexico, since the fall of 2000, all resident fellows have been 
housed in Lannan properties in Marfa, Texas.
      Marfa is a small ranching town in West Texas. It has become internationally 
known through the presence of The Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art 
organization founded by the late Donald Judd. Candidates for the residency 
program are selected through an internal nomination process; unsolicited 
applications are not accepted and the nominators are geographically dispersed 
and serve anonymously.
	White, a graduate of Williams College with a master's degree and Ph.D. 
from the University of Oregon, joined the St. Lawrence faculty in 1987. A 
former Fulbright Fellow, he has translated and edited anthologies of poetry 
from Nicaragua, Chile and Brazil. With Greg Simon, he translated Federico 
García Lorca's Poet in New York. His recent books include a translation of 
the screenplay for Cruz e Sousa: The Banished Poet by Brazilian filmmaker 
Sylvio Back; the anthology Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon's 
Sacred Vine and Fire that Engenders Fire, a book of poems in a bilingual 
edition. 
	During the residency, White wrote a series of poems exploring 
metamorphoses and the convergences between Greco-Roman and Amazonian 
mythology.

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