Slow Pilgrim: Finding One's Way With Words -- Author Scott Cairns

Librettist, memoirist, translator, and author of eight poetry collections, Scott Cairns is professor of English at the University of Missouri and founding director of Writing Workshops in Greece, a program now in its seventh year of bringing writers to Thessaloniki and Thasos every June for engagement with literary life in modern Greece. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic and have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He is a regular blogger for the Religion Section of The Huffington Post. His most recent books are “Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems” (2015), “Idiot Psalms” (2014), “Short Trip to the Edge” (spiritual memoir, 2006), “Endless Life” (translations and adaptations of Christian mystics, 2014), and a book-length essay, “The End of Suffering” (2009). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. His new projects include “Descent to the Heart,” a verse adaptation of selections from the writings of Saint Isaak of Syria. His spiritual memoir was just released in a Greek edition, Μικρό Ταξίδι στι Μεθόριο, and a new, expanded English edition will be released from Paraclete Press in 2016.