Symposium Series

Gregory Orr is the author of over seven collections of poetry, including Orpheus and Eurydice and the forth coming The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems. His poetry has appeared in numerous national literary magazines, among them The Paris Review , The American Poetry Review , and The New Yorker . He is also the author of two critical books, Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry and Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems , and is co-editor of Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World . He has won the YM-YWHA Poetry Center's Discovery Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has served as poetry consultant to the Virginia Quarterly Review for over twenty years. He is also the author of the forthcoming memoir, The Blessing (Council Oaks Press) and the non-fiction work Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry (University of Georgia Press). Mr. Orr is currently Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Robert Clem is an award-winning filmmaker trained at NYU film school and the Sundance feature Film Lab, where he developed his upcoming feature film project Stray Kids. Since forming Waterfront Pictiures in 1994 Clem has written and directed films appearing on public television, the Arts & Entertainment Network, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel and networks abroad. His 1997 PBS film Big Jim Folsom won the International Documentary Association/ABC News Video Source Award. Other feature documentaries include a trilogy on American war narratives from World War I stressing the effect of war on combatants: War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator (2003, Gold Special Jury Award, Worldfest Houston); William March/Company K (2004), and the upcoming Lafayette Escadrille. He recently optioned the World War I novel which was the subject of War Birds; it is now being developed as a dramatic feature film.

Most recently he completed the dramatic feature film Company K, based on the classic novel by William March about a group of U. S. marines in World War I. From 1994-2001 Clem was artistic director of Radio Action Theater, producing among other projects the 1997 series Centennial Faulkner, broadcast in 55 countries around the world.

In August 2001 Clem's full length play Fever, an adaptation of Crime and Punishment set in New York City in 1969, was performed as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. It is currently being developed as a feature. Other New York productions he has directed include Sam Shepar's Killer's Head and the New York premiere of John Pielmeier's A Ghost Story. Robert Clem is a native of Alabama and lives in New York.

Currently Clem is fimling documentaries on Alabama's ex-govenor John M. Patterson, catapulted to fame when his father was shot down in 1954 after being elected as a crime-fighting attorney general; Eugene Walter, the puckish Mobile writer and actor who helped found The Paris Review and acted in the films of Federico Fellini; and the golden age of African American gospel quartet music, featuring the Blind Boys of Alabama, Dixie Hummingbirds and other legendary groups. Meantime in the spring of 2007 he is slated to direct the feature film Rubicon, based on the last years of Emily Dickinson and the events that led to the posthumous publication of her poetry.

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