In our continuing effort to extend the benefit of Experiencing The Arts to the broader community, and to help the Music Department's fund raising efforts, Experiencing the Arts is pleased to sponsor "An Evening of Poetry and Classical Guitar," with one of NH's Living Treasures, poet, Donald Hall and classical guitarist and composer, Thomas Geoghegan.

Mascoma Valley Regional High School's Music Director, David Wilson is to be applauded for the dedication he has shown in his latest endeavor to take Mascoma's Band and Chorus on a trip to Washington D.C. for the Presidential Inauguration. Together with the Band Boosters, Mr. Wilson has coordinated numerous fund raising efforts to enable his students to become a part of this historic event. We hope you enjoy "An Evening of Poetry and Classical Guitar," and choose to support the Band's fund raising effort for their trip to Washington, D.C..

Christopher Hill Morse Director, Experiencing the Arts

DONALD HALL

Donald Hall's honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Hall also served as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989. In December 1993 he and Jane Kenyon were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, "A Life Together." Donald Hall has been designated as one of New Hampshire's Living Treasures.

Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of sixteen -- the same year he had his first work published. He earned a B.A. from Harvard in 1951 and a B. Litt. from Oxford in 1953. Donald Hall has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Without: Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), which was published on the third anniversary of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia. Other notable collection include The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination; The Happy Man (1986), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Exiles and Marriages (1955), which was the Academy's Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956.

Besides poetry, Donald Hall has written books on baseball, the sculptor Henry Moore, and the poet Marianne Moore; children's books, including Ox-Cart Man (1979), which won the Caldecott Medal; short stories; and plays. He has also published several autobiographical works, such as Life Work (1993), which won the New England Book award for nonfiction, and has edited more than two dozen textbooks and anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America (1990), The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (1981), New Poets of England and America (with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, 1957), and Contemporary American Poetry (1962; revised 1972). He served as poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1953 to 1962, and as a member of editorial board for poetry at Wesleyan University Press from 1958 to 1964.

THOMAS GEOGHEGAN

"Classical Guitar at its best"
Miami Herald

"Spellbinding"
Harvard Magazine

"Dynamic interpretive skills"
Guitar Player Magazine

"Marvelous contributions to the guitar repertoire"
The Guitar Review

Thomas Geoghegan studied principally with Rodrigo Riera, assistant to Andres Segovia, and was coached by Segovia, Alirio Diaz, and in composition, by Samuel Barber. He has performed as part of the Paris Festival, and has served as artist-faculty at Dartmouth College and the University of Vermont. He teaches at Middlebury College.

Commissioned works of Mr. Geoghegan include three narrated symphonic poems created for the late Robert J. Lurtsema and the "Canciones de Navidad" which were performed and recorded by soprano Kathleen Battle and guitarist Christopher Parkening. In 1997 Mr. Geoghegan was invited to lecture and give the principal recital for the Parkening Master Class at Montana State University. In January 2004 Mr. Parkening featured the Geoghegan "First Sonata" on a program entitled "20th Century Masterworks for the Guitar" at the "92nd Street Y" Tisch Center for the Arts in New York.

Mr. Geoghegan is the recipient of Awards from ASCAP, citing in 1994 his Fourth Concerto, in 1996 his settings of nine Iberian songs, and in 2002 his Sonata for Flute and Piano. He is published by Mel Bay Publications.