Freeway to the Inner Life

Poet and journalist James Lenfestey will present this lecture exploring means to discover the interior emotional and creative life as revealed through science and art. He will tell the surprising stories of ten famous poets, artists, and musicians from the Romantic to the modern age who mastered the expression of the interior life as music, art and poetry.

About the Presenter

After a career in academia, marketing communications and journalism on the editorial board of the Minnesota Star Tribune, where he won several Page One awards for excellence, since 2000 James Lenfestey has published eight collections of poems, two collections of personal essays, edited three poetry anthologies and co-edited Robert Bly in This World, University of Minnesota Press. His haibun memoir, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain (Milkweed Editions) was a finalist for the 2014 Minnesota Book Award. His sixth poetry collection, A Marriage Book: 50 Years of Poems from a Marriage (Milkweed Editions), was a finalist for two 2017 Midwest book awards. In 2020 he received the Kay Sexton Award for significant contributions and leadership in the Minnesota Literary Community. In November 2024, Milkweed Editions published his eighth poetry collection, Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements. For fifteen years he chaired the popular Literary Witnesses poetry program in Minneapolis and led a summer poetry series on Mackinac Island, Michigan. He currently serves on the boards of Red Dragonfly Press in Minnesota, the Hellbender Poetry Gathering in North Carolina, and is the founder of Poets, Writers and Musicians Against the War on the Earth. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, the journalist Susan Lenfestey. They have four children and ten grandchildren. Learn more at www.coyotepoet.com