Scott Cairns
Librettist, essayist, translator, and poet, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at University of Missouri, where he directed The Center for Literary Arts and the creative writing program. He now directs the low-residency MFA Program at Seattle Pacific University. His poetry and essays have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He has blogged for the Religion Section of The Huffington Post. His recent books include Lacunae (2023), Anaphora (2019), Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (2015), and Idiot Psalms (2014), and he has this month completed a new manuscript, Lacunae: New Poems. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.
Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Cairns:
- Sacramental Poetics — Poet and Eastern Orthodox believer Scott Cairns explains how a good poem functions like an icon: it assists the process of our becoming aware of what is real, and it is generative in the ways it keeps opening up new understandings. (56 minutes)
- Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 87 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Steven Keillor, Philip Bess, Scott Cairns, and Anthony Esolen
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 67 — FEATURED GUESTS: Eric O. Jacobsen, Allan C. Carlson, Terence L. Nichols, R. R. Reno, David Bentley Hart, J. A. C. Redford, and Scott Cairns
