The Roots in Georgia II Athens Literary Festival begins today and
continues through Sunday.  This event is cosponsored and organized by
the Athens community and the University.  It includes an impressive
array of lectures, readings, panels, films, and other activities that
should be of interest to folks in arts and humanities.  For more details
and a schedule of activities, visit
http://www.athensliteraryfestival.org.  The festival begins this
afternoon with an opening ceremony and a set of readings.  Tonight will
be the first Georgia Review Lindberg Lecture on the State and Future of
the Art of Writing, to be delivered by Edward Hirsch at 8:00 Thursday
evening in the UGA Chapel.

Edward Hirsch has published five books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers
(1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics
Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), and On
Love (1998). His sixth book, Lay Back the Darkness, will be published in
2003.  He has also written three prose books: How to Read a Poem and
Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller, Responsive
Reading (1999), and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of
Artistic Inspiration (2002).  He writes a weekly column on poetry for
the Washington Post Book World.  He has received the Prix de Rome, a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship.  He has taught at Wayne
State University, the University of Houston, and Columbia University,
and in January became the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation.