BRISTOL, Tenn., April 5, 2021 — As part of the events slated for King University’s Dogwood Homecoming 2021, to be held April 12 – 17, King’s Institute for Faith & Culture will present “A Conversation with John Van Dyke.”

The Facebook Live event, scheduled for Tuesday, April 13, at 7 p.m. EST, will feature a virtual conversation between Brandon Story, Ph.D., assistant professor of English, and King alumnus John Van Dyke, Ph.D. ‘86, author of the forthcoming book “Poetic Creation: Language and the Unsayable in the Late Poetry of Robert Penn Warren.” For more information and to participate, click here.

Van Dyke’s new book will be published April 23 by the University of Tennessee Press. The virtual conversation on April 13 will offer opportunities to win copies, and also for participants to ask questions and interact with the author.

Van Dyke holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Theology from the University of Glasgow. He is also the author of two articles on Warren, “A Critical Sense Worthy of Respect: John Marston and the Early Poetics of Robert Penn Warren” and “Language at the End of Modernism: Robert Penn Warren’s ‘A Plea in Mitigation.’” Additionally, he recently published a poem, “Sanctification,” in The Christian Century.

“Although Robert Penn Warren is best known for writing ‘All the King’s Men,’ for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, he is also regarded as one of the best poets of his generation, as evidenced by the two additional Pulitzers he was awarded for his poetry,” said Martin Dotterweich, Ph.D., professor of History and director of King University’s Institute for Faith & Culture. “Warren struggled with the limitations of language and its inability to adequately frame the human experience, and in particular, his later works acknowledge a distinctly human quality — our yearning for meaning and satisfaction in our hearts. We look forward to our conversation with John as he examines poetry’s unique power to articulate the unspoken and the unsayable in our lives.”

The event is free to the public, and registration is not required.

Access the event on the Institute for Faith and Culture Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/kingfaithandculture