SAN ANGELO, Texas — Angelo State University announced award-winning author and poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, will be the featured speaker for the 25th ASU Writer's Conference in honor of Elmer Kelton. The two-day conference is set for March 3-4 on the ASU campus.
Nye will give two presentations Thursday, March 3, in the C.J. Davidson Conference Center inside the Houston Harte University Center, 1910 Rosemont Drive:
- 9:30 a.m. - "A Conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye and Rebecca Bernard"
- 7 p.m. - "An Evening with Naomi Shihab Nye"
The conference will also include six free sessions featuring readings and presentations by 18 guest authors and poets. All of these sessions will be in the Eldon Black Recital Hall inside ASU's Carr Education-Fine Arts Building, 2602 Dena Drive. Profiles of the guest writers and the complete conference schedule are available at angelo.edu/writersconference.
An award-winning author of poetry, fiction and children's literature, Nye is also a professor of creative writing and poetry at Texas State University. A self-described "wandering poet," she has also spent more than 40 years traveling the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages.
Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico and the Middle East, she uses her writing to illustrate to our shared experience.
The author of more than 30 volumes, Nye has won Best Poetry Book awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, Writers League of Texas and the Washington Post. She has also won two Jane Addams Children's Book Awards, and was named the 2019-21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Her work has been featured on National Public Radio, PBS poetry specials and "NOW with Bill Moyers."
Also a Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets, Nye has been poetry editor for The Texas Observer for over 20 years and was the 2019-20 editor for New York Times Magazine poems. She has received the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
The ASU Writers Conference is dedicated to San Angelo's own best-selling western author, Elmer Kelton, who died in 2009. The author of more than 40 books, Kelton was a seven-time winner of the Western Writers of America's Spur Award and was the first Distinguished Visiting Professor at ASU. The conference is sponsored by the university and hosted by the Department of English and Modern Languages.
