Distinguished scholar Dr. 
Luo Lianggong will be giving a lecture on modern poetry titled "Derek Walcott and W.B. Yeats: A Perspective of Yeats's Influence on Literature of the African Diaspora." Dr. Luo will be speaking at 3:15pm on Thursday, October 15, in Physical Education 120. This lecture is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a question and answer session.
The lecture is co-sponsored by the Central China Normal University, and the Cal State L.A. College of Arts and Letters, College of Professional and Global Education, Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Department of English, Statement Magazine and Statement Unbound Literary Society.
Luo Lianggong, Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature, is professor of English and vice dean of the School of Foreign Languages, and director of the Centre for English Literature, at the Central China Normal University, in Wuhan, China. Concurrently, he is Assistant Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Literature Studies (an AHCI-indexed journal), member of the Editorial Board of Forum for World Literature Studies (Scopus- and Ebsco-indexed) and the Journal of English Language & Literature (Korea), Deputy Chief Editor of the International Editorial Board of The Yeats Journal of Korea, Executive Director of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics (CAAP, est. 2008), and standing director of the Council of Chinese Association for the Study of American Literature (founded in 1978). His academic research focuses on English poetry and poetics, African American Literature, and literary translation study. He is author, translator, and editor of over 10 books and has published about 60 articles, including A Survey of English Poetry (2002, 2005), The Interplay between Art and Politics: On Langston Hughes’s Poetry (2010), LANGUAGE Poetics (2013), and Critical History of the 20th-century African American Poetry (forthcoming). He is recipient of awards and scholarships from China National Fund for Social Sciences and Philosophy, China National Fund for Publication, Fulbright Scholarship, Hubei Provincial Fund for Philosophy and Social Sciences, and Hubei Provincial Ministry of Education. He has organized and hosted a series of large-scale international conferences on literary studies, and has been invited to deliver keynote speeches and lectures at universities and symposiums in the United States, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Portugal, and Taiwan and Mainland China as well.