Artists
   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
   Layne Longfellow
   Michael Hoppé

LAYNE LONGFELLOW
Layne Longfellow is the Poetry Ambassador from the Friends of the Longfellow House, Cambridge, MA. His recordings of Henry W. Longfellow’s poetry were done in Longfellow’s two homes – Portland, ME and Cambridge.

Layne was the host and reader on Henry Longfellow’s 200th birthday, February 27, 2007, at the “official” birthday dinner, Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, Sudbury, MA. He concluded Longfellow’s bicentennial year with a reading at the National Gallery of Art, accompanied by: Donald Sosin, composer; Dr. Ann Hutchinson Guest, Longfellow’s nearest living relative; Vicki Toye, great great granddaughter of “The Village Blacksmith;” and followed by the premiere of a newly restored print of the 1929 version of Longfellow’s epic Evangeline, starring Dolores del Rio.

Layne has read the poetry of his distant cousin in historical venues throughout North America, including the storied Acadian chapel at Grand Pre, Nova Scotia. His influential paper, “Longfellow, Scholarly Poet of the Heart,” was prepared for the “Zeit/Sprunge” conference of the University of Salzburg.  Reports of several of these events are available in “Media Coverage and Reviews”.

Elected to the Speakers’ Hall of Fame in 1986, Dr. Layne Longfellow received a B.A. (Ohio University) and Ph.D. (University of Michigan) in experimental psychology, with fellowships from the National Science and Woodrow Wilson Foundations; an NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellowship supported his two years of work with Dr. Carl Rogers.

He served as Director of Executive Seminars at The Menninger Foundation, Academic Vice President of Prescott College, and on the faculty of Reed College.

Dr. Longfellow also graduated from Jackson High School, Ohio, in the foothills of Appalachia. His great-great-grandfather Michael Longfellow migrated to southern Ohio from Maine, coincident with Henry Longfellow's leaving Maine for Harvard.

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