The Johns Hopkins Gazette: April 13, 1998
Apr. 13 1998
VOL. 27, NO. 30

  

In Brief

Johns Hopkins Gazette Online Edition

Poet Kenneth Koch delivers inaugural memorial lecture

Celebrated poet and Columbia University professor Kenneth Koch will deliver the inaugural Joshua Ringel Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m., Tuesday, April 14, in Mudd Hall on the Homewood campus. Koch's talk on poetry and teaching creative writing is being held in April in conjunction with National Poetry Month.

The Ringel family has established the fund in memory of Joshua Ringel, whose life was tragically cut short two months before his 28th birthday in an October 1996 motorcycle accident. Ringel, a devoted teacher with a passion for poetry, was in the middle school at Gilman when he attended Hopkins' Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth, a summer program for academically talented youth. Ringel later attended Columbia University, where he studied poetry under Koch.

Ringel's family hopes the annual lecture will offer students and teachers an opportunity to understand and explore imaginative writing. The lecture and the fund are administered by Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York and by IAAY.

Kenneth Koch, the first Joshua Ringel Memorial lecturer, has received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry (1995) and the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry (1996). Besides poetry, Koch has written many books on teaching creative writing to children. Many educators believe his 1970 book, Wishes, Lies and Dreams, revolutionized the teaching of writing to children. Koch has two new books coming out this spring: Making Your Own Days: Reading and Writing Poetry, a guide for a general audience, and Straits, a new book of poems. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative has been sending writers like Koch, Grace Paley, June Jordan, Rosellen Brown, Philip Lopate and Victor Hernandez Cruz into schools and other community sites for over 30 years. T&W also publishes books and magazines on teaching and writing. T&W's Center for Imaginative Writing is a resource library and meeting place for students, teachers, writers and the general public.


Theoretical astrophysicist to present Potts Lecture

Sir Martin Rees, Royal Society Research Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, will present the second annual Isaac and Leah M. Potts Memorial Lecture on cosmology, at 5:30 p.m. on April 28 in the Schafler Auditorium of the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy on the Homewood campus.

This lectureship, given in memory of Isaac and Leah M. Potts by their sons Albert and Efrem Potts, brings leading scholars to Hopkins to comment on the comparative world-views of cosmology presented by the Bible and modern science.

In this year's lecture, Professor Rees, one of the world's leading theoretical astrophysicists, will speak on "Our Universe and Others."


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