Chief Oren Lyons. (Larry Palumbo/Coyote Magic)

Chief Oren Lyons, a Native American leader and environmental activist, offers a lecture titled Peace, Power, Righteousness: Environmental Stewardship From a Native Perspective at 7 p.m. Monday, March 3, in the Peter J. Gomes Chapel, 275 College St.

Presented by the Office of Equity and Diversity in cooperation with other offices at 乐播传媒, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6031.

Lyons, a member of the Onondaga and Seneca nations, is a Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan and a chief of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee (“People of the Longhouse”).

Lyons attended Syracuse University on an athletic scholarship. A lifelong lacrosse player, he was a standout in the sport at Syracuse, was later elected to the Lacrosse Hall of Fame and today is honorary chairman of the Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team.

Graduating Syracuse with a degree in fine arts, Lyons became a successful commercial artist. He later taught at the University of Buffalo, and was named a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and Professor Emeritus of American Indian Studies.

In 1977, Lyons was a founding member of the Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth, a council that seeks to infuse Native American culture into contemporary cultural and political discourse.

In 1982, he helped establish the Working Group on Indigenous Populations at the United Nations. He is the recipient of the United Nations NGO World Peace Prize.

He serves on the Executive Committee of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival. Among many other honors, he is a recipient of Sweden’s prestigious Friends of the Children Award, along with his colleague, the late Nelson Mandela.

Lyons was the subject of Oren Lyons the Faithkeeper, a 1991 PBS documentary by Bill Moyers, and appeared in the 2007 documentary聽The 11th Hour, a documentary on the state of the natural world and climate change, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.

He is the author, co-author or editor of several books and has illustrated a number of children’s books.

Here’s a list of the 乐播传媒 and related offices and programs making Lyons’ visit possible:

The departments of history and athletics; the environmental studies program; the Harward Center for Community Partnerships; the offices of Intercultural Education and of Sustainability; the Learning Associates Program; the Multifaith Chaplaincy; and the 乐播传媒 Group of the Wabanaki-乐播传媒-Bowdoin-Colby Collaborative.

One of Maine’s most respected poets, Wesley McNair visits 乐播传媒 at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 28.

His appearance, part of the Language Arts Live series of literary readings at 乐播传媒, takes place in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave., and is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6326 or 207-786-6256.

Language Arts Live brings highly regarded writers to 乐播传媒 to read from and discuss their work. The series is sponsored by the English department, the Learning Associates Program, the 乐播传媒 Humanities Fund, the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies, and the John Tagliabue Poetry fund.

One of Maine’s most effective advocates of the art of poetry, poems have won praise from readers, reviewers and fellow poets alike for more than 40 years. Intended to be “both accessible and complex,” as a reviewer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote, his lines find truth in the small, often overlooked events of our common existence.

His most recent book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 2010), which showcases some of his best poetry from six previous volumes and a sampling of new work. He has authored or edited 18 books, including poetry, nonfiction and anthologies.

In 2006, McNair was selected for a prestigious United States Artists Fellowship, awarded annually to America’s finest living artists. He has held grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship in literature and two NEA fellowships.

McNair served four times on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and in 2010 served as guest editor in poetry for the Pushcart Prize anthology. His poetry has appeared in two editions of The Best American Poetry and in more than 50 anthologies, and has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and 14 episodes of The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

McNair, of Mercer, served as a professor at the University of Maine at Farmington from 1987 until his retirement in 2004; founded and directed the Creative Writing program there; and is now UMF’s Writer in Residence.

He was a visiting professor at Colby College from 1999 to 2004. Colby acquired his personal papers in 2006 and has created an interactive McNair archive and teaching site on the Web.

乐播传媒 has a long tradition of welcoming poets and fiction writers to read from their work. During a 1932 U.S. tour, William Butler Yeats read his poetry to a large audience in the 乐播传媒 Chapel. For 30 years, the inimitable 乐播传媒 professor and poet John Tagliabue brought many distinguished writers to campus, including Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Since 1991, when it formally instituted a concentration in creative writing within the major, the English department has hosted public readings, class visits and residencies by more than 75 acclaimed poets and writers, among them Nobel Prize laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott; Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Muldoon, Donald Justice, 乐播传媒 alumna Elizabeth Strout, Yusef Komunyakaa and Richard Ford; Carolyn Forch茅, Grace Paley, Galway Kinnell, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky and Sarah Manguso.

Recent 乐播传媒 alums who have authored prize-winning first books have also returned to read: Jessica Anthony (class of 1996), Christian Barter (1990), Gabriel Fried (1996), Christina Chiu (1991) and Craig Teicher (2001).

Admission is $6 general admission and $3 for senior citizens and non-乐播传媒 students. For more information, please visit www.batestickets.com or call 207-786-6161.

Myers and her troupe also offer a master class for intermediate and advanced modern dancers at 11 a.m. Sunday, May 2, in Plavin Studios, Merrill Gymnasium, 141 Russell St. For more information about this free event, please call 207-786-8294.

The company’s residency is sponsored by the 乐播传媒 dance program, with support from the 乐播传媒 Learning Associates Program and the New England Foundation for the Arts.

The five-member Myers company combines robust athleticism, theatricality and social commentary in a style accessible to a wide audience. Myers’ choreography has been performed nationwide at venues including Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Tanglewood Music Center, Velocity Dance Center and DanceNowNYC, and in Maine at the 乐播传媒 Dance Festival and Stonington Opera House.

The company wins praise for its way of connecting with audiences and conjuring up a world onstage. “Myers’ work bursts with the high-voltage kinetics, wit, quirks and most of all clear talent that characterize her mind, a place I always enjoy visiting,” says choreographer Nancy Smith Fichter of Florida State University.

Myers’ work has explored such engaging themes as personal interactions in an increasingly technological world and the “underbelly” of modern motherhood. Currently the troupe is completing a piece that explores drama and fame titled “Theatre in the Head” — a work described by 乐播传媒 Dance Festival director Laura Faure as a “deeply investigative and playful journey.”

Company artistic director Myers is also a professor of dance at Connecticut College. Prior to founding her company in 2000 she performed as a dancer in New York City with Joy Kellman/Co. and as a guest artist with companies including Momix. She also worked as a choreographic assistant, including choreographing a record release event for Aerosmith.

Other members of the company are assistant artistic director Diana Deaver, Tara Burns, Kellie Ann Lynch, Philip Montana and Rebecca Woods.

Both events are open to the public at no cost. Language Arts Live is sponsored by the 乐播传媒 English department, the Humanities Fund, the Learning Associates Program and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information, please contact this eosucha@bates.edu.

Digital poet Brian Kim Stefans reads and performs from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 4, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave. Known primarily as a poet, Stefans also works as a visual and new-media artist and critic and is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His most recent book of poetry, Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works (Roof Publishing, 2007), continues the critical acclaim accorded his other books. He is also the author of Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews 1994-2005 (Salt Publishing, 2003), an informal chronicle of digital poetics/Asian American poetry in the from the past decade.

Stefans has had a key role in shaping the terrain of new media poetics. A prolific e-book publisher, Arras places much of his work on his Web site, arras.net, devoted to digital poetics and new media. He is the editor of the /ubu (鈥漵lash ubu鈥�) . His internet art and digital poems, such as The Truth Interview (with Kim Rosenfield) and the Flash Polaroids can all be found at arras.net.

Language Arts Live presents an evening with poets Caroline Knox, Dorothea Lasky and Dara Weir from the Wave Books poetry press at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

An award-winning poet, Knox will release her seventh poetry collection, “Nine Worthies” in 2010. Knox is the winner of the Recommended Reading Award in 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book and the Maurice English Award in 2005, and has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Yale/Mellon Visiting Faculty Program, and from Poetry magazine. Knox’s work has been further anthologized in two editions of the classic collection “Best American Poetry” in 1988 and 1994.

Lasky is the author of two full-length poetry collections: AWE (2007) and Black Life (2010). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and other journals. She holds a master’s in fine arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s in education from Harvard University.

To promote AWE, Lasky held a virtual book tour, posting videos of herself reading in different rooms of her house over the course of a month. In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, she said of her video readings, “I think there鈥檚 something about the video. It鈥檚 a different kind of intimacy than going to see someone read: You can be really close to the person in a way that you couldn鈥檛 if you were sitting there.”

Weir is the author of nine collections of poetry including Selected Poems (2009) and Remnant of Hannah (2006). Recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Weir held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in 2005. She is the 2001 winner of the American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize.

Weir’s poetry “draw[s] a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence” said a writer for the Harvard Review.

Weir currently directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Bradfield is a visual artist, Web designer, naturalist and poet. Her poetry focuses on both the self and the greater natural world. It “turns a critical, loving eye on her own nature as a lesbian, as well as on the queer world of nature, which she interprets as a professional naturalist hired to show people what to see in what they see,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote.

The author of Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books, 2008) and Approaching Ice (Persea Books, 2009), Bradfield has received fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Program, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Interpretive Work won the 2009 Audre Lorde Award in Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, celebrating lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender literature.

Bradfield is the founder and manager of Broadsided Press, an online collaborative press that publishes monthly visual and literary collaborations as Adobe Acrobat files that are downloaded and shared around the world.

Bradfield has a master’s degree in poetry from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she lived for five years. She now lives on Cape Cod.

Sponsored by the Department of English and the 乐播传媒 Learning Associates Program, this event is open to the public at no cost.

Nadel’s lecture, titled “Wand Me!”: Assuming the (Subject) Position of the Compliant Body in the Age of Terror, presents research related to Nadel’s current book-in-progress, Unintelligent Design, or How Bush Knew.

Nadel is the William T. Bryan Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches courses in post-WWII American literature and culture, film and media studies, American studies and critical race studies. He is the author of numerous articles, essays and books, including Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2005), Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America (Rutgers University Press, 1997) and Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (University of Iowa Press, 1991).

Longtime Maine grower and former Atlantic Monthly art director Terry Silber will talk about perennial garden design at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, in the Muskie Archives.

Novelist Carolyn Chute and the owners of an organic Maine farm are among the specialists working with students in two innovative programs that are engaging the campus with the world outside.

One in the humanities, one in environmental studies, these “learning associates” programs enrich the curriculum with the real-world experience and perspectives of top practitioners in an occupation related to some aspect of the curriculum. “The students’ minds are opened to something beyond the immediate classroom,” says Judith Robbins, the Mellon learning associate in the humanities.

Many of these practitioners are from Maine. Terry and Mark Silber, who run Hedgehog Hill Farm in Sumner, are teaching a seminar on organic farming in the environmental studies program. A well-known Maine novelist, Carolyn Chute worked with students in creative writing and storytelling courses this semester as part of the senior thesis program.

Students found the interaction with Chute eye-opening, says Robbins. Chute, author of the acclaimed The Beans of Egypt, Maine (Ticknor & Fields, 1985), is an outspoken champion of Maine’s rural poor. Robbins says that several students, in evaluating the sessions with Chute, explained how she made them newly aware of Maine’s economic divisions.

One student, self-described as someone from a “middle-class family who had never had the chance to meet real, true working-class people,” realized the “similarities of all types and classes of people.” Another wrote simply that that Chute “opened my eyes to a new way of viewing literature.”

The environmental studies program involves the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences. The Silbers’ upper-level seminar explores the practical and ethical aspects of environmentally sustainable farming. The Silbers are the authors of Growing Herbs and Vegetables From Seed to Harvest (Knopf, 1999).

Camille Parrish is the environmental studies learning associate. Through setting up internships and engaging guest faculty like the Silbers, Parrish helps environmental studies majors connect their classroom work with real-world environmental issues as near as the campus and as far away as Thailand. By involving students with such local organizations as the 乐播传媒 Mill Redevelopment Corporation and the Maine Rural Workers Coalition, Parrish also furthers another primary 乐播传媒 goal: strengthening ties with the community.

In fact, the learning-associate initiative evolved in 1999 from President Donald Harward’s drive to engage the college with the world outside campus in more concrete and meaningful ways. (Harward retires at the end of June 2002.)

The New York-based Andrew Mellon Foundation awarded two grants last year to support the initiative. A $300,000 grant is supporting the learning-associate component of the environmental studies program, as well as the purchase of equipment. A $450,000 grant is funding the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities, now in its second semester.

In addition to Chute, the humanities program this semester is funding Denis Ledoux, a Francophone Maine memoirist, Lake Affect, a Buffalo-based sound performance quartet, a writing specialist in the Spanish language, poets, pianists and a dance critic.