Seton Hill University is proud to host “Art & Survival,” a presentation by California State Poet Laureate and Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow Al Young on September 18, 2008. The presentation will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the Reeves Theatre on Seton Hill’s Greensburg, Pa. campus, and is free and open to the public.

This public event is part of Al Young’s Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow residency at Seton Hill. From September 15 through Friday 19, 2008, Young will attend courses and participate in formal and informal discussions and workshops with Seton Hill faculty and students.

Al Young is the current California State Poet Laureate and was born in Mississippi on May 31, 1939. Young has been a poet, writer, teacher and lecturer throughout his literary career and has lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Young was awarded a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship in 1966 at Stanford University, where he later began his teaching career as a lecturer in creative writing and literature. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz and has traveled around the world lecturing on a variety of topics, including American popular culture, the arts, music, myth, creativity, and human survival. His books include “Color: A Sampling of African American Writers;” “Heaven: Poems 1958-1988;” “Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs;” “Seduction by Light;” and “Ask Me Now.” Mr.Young’s poems, non-fiction works, and stories have appeared in magazines, including Essence, New Directions, and The Paris Review. As a screenwriter, he has produced scripts for Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. As an editor, he co-founded the literary magazine Yardbird Reader and a similar project, Quilt, which sought out and published works by new talent.

Now in its 35th year, the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows program brings prominent artists, diplomats, journalists, business leaders, and other nonacademic professionals to campuses across the United States for five days of teaching and dialogue with students and faculty members. Through a week-long residential program of classes, seminars, workshops, lectures, and informal discussions, the Fellows create better understanding and new connections between the academic and nonacademic worlds. The Council of Independent Colleges accepted the invitation of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to administer its renowned Visiting Fellows program, effective January 1, 2008.