Spring 2000

Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019) was the author of more than fifteen collections of poetry, including Blue Horses (Penguin, 2014); New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon, 1992), which won the National Book Award; House of Light (Beacon, 1990), which won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award; and American Primitive (Little, Brown, 1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her honors include an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Edward L. Ayers is an American historian and the ninth president of the University of Richmond.  His book In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 won the Bancroft Prize in 2004.