Poet Jennifer Grotz, just named a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow for poetry, reflects on place, inspiration, and the ‘vocabulary’ she found in a baroque French monastery.

The author of four volumes of poetry, Grotz joins 20 other current Rochester faculty who have received Guggenheim Fellowships, which are among the most coveted academic awards.

Can poetry thrive in an age of instant communication? As April’s National Poetry Month begins, University’s poetry faculty and students have found that the answer is an emphatic “yes.” The pace of digital life has only quickened over the last ten years since Twitter was founded, but the slower process of reading and crafting poetry continues, robustly, at Rochester.

Aaron Banks ’18 and Julianne McAdams ’17 have won scholarships to the highly competitive program of workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

Rochester will host the U.S. premiere of God Has No Country, a one-man play written and performed by Donal Courtney. The drama tells the story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who used his Vatican connections to harbor Jews, ultimately saving more than 6,500 lives.

The University of Rochester has received a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to increase undergraduates’ engagement with the humanities. Titled “Humanities for Life,” the five-year initiative is designed to engage students early in their academic careers.

The University of Chicago professor will be in residence from March 22 to 24. A scholar of Hinduism and mythology, her work highlights the “often messy collision of religion, science, and politics.”

Poet James Longenbach and novelist Joanna Scott, both members of the English department, have received fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation this spring, for notable achievement in the arts and humanities.

Christopher Celenza, a professor of classics at Johns Hopkins University, will speak on “Machiavelli: Yesterday and Today” as the keynote speaker of this year’s Ferrari Humanities Symposia on March 7.

Composers Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon—both professors of composition at the Eastman School of Music—and choreographer Darren Stevenson, the director of PUSH Physical Theater, were honored for their contributions to the original opera Don’t Blame Anyone.