Contact: Kenneth Billings
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Richard Lyons is being recognized by the Mississippi Humanities Council as Mississippi State University's 2007 Humanities Teacher of the Year.
Presented annually at public and private institutions of higher learning around the state, the award carries a $500 honorarium and the responsibility to share humanities scholarship in a public setting with students, colleagues and other interested audiences.
The English professor and MSU faculty member since 1994 recently presented a campus lecture on creative writing, the English department's academic program he directs. He also read from "Granite from Sugar Water," his fourth book of poetry currently in the editing phase.
Lyons said most of the forthcoming book is centered on jazz music and "is somewhat of a carryover" from his previous work, "Fleur Carnivore," winner of the 2005 Washington Prize given annually by the Washington, D.C.-based Word Works national literary organization.
"It is mostly meditative poetry, or what I call 'episodic meditation,'" Lyons explained. "It is poetry about jazz music and artists, particularly African-American artists."
A doctoral graduate in English and creative writing from the University of Houston, Lyons is the author of two other award-winning books of poetry. He received the Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press for "These Modern Nights" (1988) and the James Dickey Memorial Award from the University of South Carolina Press for "Hours of the Cardinal" (2000).
Additionally, he was selected for the 1992 Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award by the Academy of American Poets.
Over his academic career, Lyons has had works featured in the "Gettysburg Review," "Cimarron Review," "Paris Review," "New Republic," and other national journals.
He also is a graduate of the universities of Massachusetts and Arizona.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.