Liberal to honor alumni poets

The late William Stafford, c’37, g’46, and B.H. “Pete” Fairchild, c’64, g’68, two boyhood residents of Liberal who grew up to become distinguished poets, will be honored Oct. 16 when Liberal High School renames its library the Stafford-Fairchild Library.

“It is always an honor to be associated with William Stafford,” Fairchild says. “He was not only a great poet, he was a great American.

“It’s also an honor for me because when I grew up in Liberal, the city library and high school library meant everything to me. I don’t know how I would have survived without those libraries.”

Stafford, who died in 1993, wrote more than 60 books of poetry and prose. His major collection, Traveling Through the Dark, won the National Book Award in 1963. He also served as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, the position now known as the poet laureate.

Stafford always held Kansas in high regard, said his son Kim Stafford, who visited campus in 2003 to read from his memoir, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford.

“It wasn’t just a good place,” Kim wrote of his father’s stories about Kansas. “It was the one and only good life.”

Fairchild lives now in Claremont, Calif. His fourth book of poems, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Midwest, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2002. W.W. Norton will publish a new edition of his second book of poems, Local Knowledge, in fall 2005.