CHESTERTOWN, MD—On Monday, March 18, the Joseph H. McLain Program in Environmental Studies at Washington College will present “When Bird Dogs Ruled the Earth—Poetry, Hunting, and the Environment,” a lecture by Johns Hopkins Professor Dave Smith. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center. 

The Eliot Coleman Professor of Poetry and Chair of the Writing Seminars at Hopkins, Dave Smith is a renowned poet, critic, author, and editor. The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist has received fellowships from the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Smith has published 25 volumes of poetry, fiction, essays and criticism, including The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000, and the 2006 essay collection Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry. His work often concerns history and regional identity and is characterized by complex narrative. “That a poem should tell a story,” Smith has observed, “seems to be as right as that it should look and sound like the most intense lyrical speech we can imagine.”