Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Classical guitarist Jhon Akers will honor Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and biographer Carl Sandburg during a special Thursday [Jan. 25] program at Mississippi State University.
Titled "Carl Sandburg's Love of the Guitar," the free event begins at 4 p.m. in the fourth-floor suite of the Swalm Chemical Engineering Building. The College of Arts and Sciences' Institute for the Humanities is sponsor.
Akers is an associate professor of Spanish at Wofford College in South Carolina. A doctoral graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, he also has taught at the Webb School of California and St. Mary's College in Indiana.
At Wofford, Akers also leads the Troubadour Series, a classical guitar program featuring local and regional artists. Among other national and international locations, he has performed at the Carl Sandburg home in Flat Rock, N.C., a U.S. Park Service-maintained national historic site.
Sandburg (1878-1967) was an Illinois native whose early life was spent in farm labor and bricklaying. His later poetic collections--among them "Chicago Poems" (1916), "The People, Yes" (1936) and Pulitzer-winning "Complete Poems" (1950)--celebrate the everyday lives of Americans.
He also won a Pulitzer for the final four volumes of his massive biography of President Abraham Lincoln. In all, his Lincoln work filled six volumes.
For additional information on Akers' performance, contact interim institute director Gary Myers at 662-325-2646.
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Ed. note: Jhon is the correct spelling of Dr. Akers' first name.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.