Guest Speaker Michael Dennis Browne along with Margaret Hasse

Saturday August 11, Northwoods Art & Book Festival 10 a.m. -  Poetry Sings in Everyday Life

Michael Dennis Browne was born in England, of mostly Irish ancestry, in 1940, and has lived in the United States since 1965. Two of his collections have won the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. As a librettist and lyricist he has written many texts for music, working for almost four decades with composer Stephen Paulus; their best-known shorter works include “Pilgrims’ Hymn,” “The Road Home,” “Hymn to the Eternal Flame” and “Hymn for America.” To Be Certain of the Dawn, a post-Holocaust oratorio (BIS Records), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music by the Minnesota Orchestra. He has recently worked with Craig Hella Johnson on the fusion oratorio Considering Matthew Shepard. Browne taught at Iowa, Columbia and Bennington and is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for thirty-nine years and was a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He was the first Kilian McDonnell Writer-in-Residence at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University, and in 2014 received the Graven Award from Wartburg College.

Margaret Hasse, from Vermillion, South Dakota, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Minnesota. She has made her home in the Twin Cities since 1973. Widely published in journals and anthologies, her poetry has also received prestigious literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, and The McKnight Foundation. Hasse, active in the community as an arts consultant and writing teacher, is also a frequent presenter at events, such as reading series, book clubs, and writing groups. Hasse’s poems are imprinted on sidewalks in Saint Paul and will be part of the Saint Paul Almanac’s Impressions project with posters on public transportation. Garrison Keillor has broadcast her poems on The Writer’s Almanac. Hasse and her husband live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and have two adult sons.