UO professor to open international literary conference

Barbara Mossberg, a humanities professor in the Clark Honors College, has been chosen to contribute to the 2015 Abroad Writers' Conference this month in Dublin, Ireland — which was honored as UNESCO's fourth "City of Literature" in 2010.

The annual conference is an international summit that features acclaimed book award winners and professional writers from around the United States as well as from the United Kingdom. Mossberg will open the conference with a 30-minute poetry reading.

Participants attend book readings, panel discussions and conversations on contemporary and historic literature. The conference takes place at the famed Butler's Townhouse in Ireland's capital city from Saturday, Dec. 12, through the following Saturday, Dec. 19.

Mossberg's career in literature and education has spanned several decades and has taken her to more than 20 countries to write and teach. Her work as a professor and writer has led to environmental activism, humanities advocacy and historic literary research.

She has held two senior Fulbright lectureships, received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, one of the first fellowships from the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society’s Jane Grant Program as well as American Council of Learned Societies awards and was also appointed United States scholar-in-residence for the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.

A prize-winning teacher and scholar at the UO, she represented liberal arts statewide and served as acting dean of the UO Graduate School and co-director of the American Studies Program. Outside of the UO, Mossberg was a senior fellow on the American Council on Education, president of Goddard College and founding dean of California State University at Monterey Bay.

Mossberg has performed her poetry around the world via flash mobs, poetry slams, theater performances, literature crawls and other platforms and has published several books of her own. Her most recent published work is titled "Sometimes the Woman in the Mirror is Not You," and she also founded and hosts a weekly hour-long radio program called, "The Poetry Slow Down."

— By Nathaniel Brown, Public Affairs Communications