Douglas Burnet Smith

Poet Douglas Burnet Smith visited Shawnigan this week to speak to the Writing 12 class. Smith, a professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was in the area on a week-long promotional tour for his most recent work, Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie, a series of prose poems investigating the life of one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century. In his lecture/reading, he reminded students of the profound challenges Curie surmounted— including a childhood in Russian-occupied Poland and her gender in the male-dominated academies of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—on the way to winning Nobel prizes in both chemistry and physics. Later, Professor Smith spoke to one of the AP Literature classes and guided them through a complex reading of Robert Frost’s "Design." It was a great privilege for students to work with a writer of such accomplishment and a teacher of such personal grace and patience.

– Jay Connolly