The quest for recognition is one every author embarks upon, but one whose end few authors reach. For Anele Rubin, who will read from her new book, Trying to Speak, tonight in Center Hall 216, that quest for recognition has been realized.
Rubin is the winner of the 2006 Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer’s Award. Typically, winners of the award vie against about 50 other authors. The winner visits all of the GLCA member colleges to do readings.
“It’s an opportunity to share your work with campus communities, building an audience for your own poems and for poetry in general,” Prof. Marcus Hudson said. Hudson is the College’s poet and has directed the program that chooses the winner of the New Writer’s Award in the early 1990s. Former Wabash professor Don Baker also helped start the program in the 1970s.
According to Hudson, Rubin’s poetry is full of life and soul.
“It’s her first book, but you can tell she has a lot of life experiences and brings them to bear in her poetry,” he said. “It’s accessible and reader friendly, but it’s not simple. It’s very rich poetry you can enter into and understand, and it speaks to a wide audience.”
Other critics have spoken very highly of Rubin’s work.
“The voice is so new, and yet the movement is so artful, subtle, and modest,” Phillip Judge wrote.
Another critic, Ruth Stone, described Rubin’s poems as “visual, tactile, simple, and complex.”
In addition to her reading, the reception and book signing that will follow, Rubin will also be visiting with students and faculty. She will visit an advanced poetry class, have lunch with Wabash poets, and have dinner with the English faculty.
Copies of Rubin’s book, Trying to Speak, will be available for purchase at the reading.