Close Close

  • Poet Richard Blanco

    Location: Pollak Theatre

    President Obama’s Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States—meaning his mother, 7 months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born. Only 45 days later, the family emigrated once more and settled in Miami. His acclaimed first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, explores the yearnings and negotiation of cultural identity as a Cuban- American, and received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize. His second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead, won the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center for its continued exploration of the universal themes of cultural identity and homecoming.

  • Visiting Writers: Louise Gluck

    Louise Glück is one of America’s finest contemporary poets. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Glück is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of a dozen widely acclaimed books. Stephen Dobyns, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said “no American poet writes better than Louise Glück, perhaps none can lead us so deeply into our own nature.” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.”

  • Willis, Aliki and Tony Barnstone

    Location: Wilson Auditorium

    Willis Barnstone was born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, and Yale. He taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution went to China, where he was later a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). His publications include Modern European Poetry (Bantam, 1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984) The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (New England, 1996), a memoir biography With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Illinois, 1993), and To Touch the Sky (New Directions, 1999). His literary translation of the New Testament The New Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse was published by Riverhead Books in 2002. Most recently, he has published two more collections of translations: The Complete Poems of Sappho and The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, Barnstone is Distinguished Professor at Indiana University. 

    Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Her books of poems are Blue Earth (Iris, 2004), Wild With It (Sheep Meadow, 2002), a National Books Critics Circle Notable Book, Madly in Love (Carnegie-Mellon, 1997), Windows in Providence (Curbstone, 1981), and The Real Tin Flower (which was introduced by Anne Sexton and was published by Macmillan in 1968, when she was twelve years old). Her translation, The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy came out with W.W. Norton in 2006. In 2007, Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development appeared with University Press of New England. She has two books of poems forthcoming: Dr. God, Dear Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (the Sheep Meadow Press) and Bright Body (White Pine Press). Barnstone spent the fall of 2006 in Greece as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. Her project was to write a sequence of poems in the voice of an imaginary poet, Eva Victoria Perera, a Sephardic Jew from Thessaloniki, who survives the Holocaust. She is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri, Columbia. 

    Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College and holds a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley. He has won fellowships and poetry awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Pushcart Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Contest, the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Competition (Chester H. Jones Foundation), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, the Cecil Hemley Award, and the Poetry Society of America. In 2006 he won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry for his manuscript The Golem of Los Angeles, which was published by Red Hen Press in 2007. He won the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry in 2008 for Tongue of War and won the grand prize in the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, in Strokestown, Ireland, in 2008. 

    His first book of poetry, Impure, a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the National Poetry Series Prize, and other national literary competitions, appeared with the University Press of Florida in June of 1999. He is also the author of a chapbook of poems, Naked Magic. His second book of poems, Sad Jazz: Sonnets appeared in 2005 with Sheep Meadow Press. His most recent book of poems, The Golem of Los Angeles, won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry and was published in late 2007 by Red Hen Press. His new project is Pulp Sonnets, a collection of poems based upon classic pulp fiction, comic books, and horror, film noir and sci-fi movies.

  • Matthew and Michael Dickman

    Matthew Dickman

    A remarkable young writer, Matthew Dickman won the APR/Honnickman First Book Prize for All-American Poem (2008), chosen by Tony Hoagland and published by Copper Canyon Press. A book of great hopefulness, gratitude, and praise, it plumbs the ecstatic nature of daily life, where pop culture and sacred longing go hand in hand. The work is expansive and intimate, rushing forth like a river, with a fluid unstoppable energy. Matthew Lippman praises it thus: “The language is a music, and one has to understand that when you jump into the poems they will take you places you could have never imagined.” Dorianne Laux says his poems are “Ravenous for life, for love, for forgiveness.”
His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker and Tin House. He has received fellowships for his work from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Matthew has been profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker; with his twin brother, poet Michael Dickman. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

    Michael Dickman

    Michael Dickman began writing poems “after accidentally reading a Neruda ode.” His first collection is The End of the West (2009) from Copper Canyon Press. A brilliant debut, his poetry breathes in the entire world, it’s delights, cruelty, boredom, and griefs, and breathes out a prayer, one that holds both grace and suffering, equally, lightly. “There is only this world and this world // What a relief / created // over and over.” Franz Wright calls him a young poetic genius with a “style like no one else’s” and elucidates, “With the utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit, Michael Dickman’s poems give a voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys which bind together the vast human family.”

  • Colm Tóibín

    Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His nonfiction includes The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time. He writes frequently for such publications as the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. He was a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, and has taught at Stanford, Princeton, and American universities, as well as the New School, in the United States. His books have been translated into eighteen languages.

  • Nicole Cooley

    Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her new book of poems, Breach, about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in March 2010. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, came out with LSU Press in April 2004 and was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. She also published a novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love, with Regan Books/Harper Collins (1998). She has received a Discovery/The Nation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. 

    Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, Missouri Review, Pleaides, and Mississippi Review, among other magazines. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Queens College—City University of New York where she directs the new MFA program in creative writing and literary translation.

  • Mihaela Mosculiuc

    Mihaela Mosculiuc

    Part of the South-Central-Eastern Europe: Legacies and Identities Project

    Born and raised in Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc came to the United States in 1996 to complete graduate work in American literature. She received an M.A. from Salisbury University, an M.F.A. in poetry from New England College, and a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Maryland. Her poetry collection, Father Dirt (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award) appeared from Alice James Books in 2010, and her co-translation of Carmelia Leonte’s Death Searches for You a Second Time was published by Red Dragonfly Press in 2003. She has lectured on Eastern European American immigration literature, Roma/Gypsy culture, and translation theory at universities in the US and in Europe. Her translations of Romanian poetry appear in Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, America, Absinthe,and Mid-American Review. She has published poems, reviews, and articles in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Poetry International,Pleiades, Interculturality and Translation, Soundings, and Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics (Frankfurt: Lang, 2009).

  • David St. John

    David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and The Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of The Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing. David St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled, The Auroras. He is also the co-editor, with Cole Swensen, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.

  • Andrei Codrescu

    “An Evening with Andrei Codrescu: From Transylvania to New Orleans—A Poet’s Journey”

    Codrescu will discuss the politics and culture(s) of East and West, the collapse of communism (which he covered for the U.S. media) and its aftermath, and the historical and literary changes that are reshaping Eastern Europe and informing his own relations to spaces of origin or adoption. He will talk about what it means to live simultaneously in several worlds, both chronologically and biographically, and what political sense this nomadism makes (or doesn’t). His talk will draw on his memoir, “The Hole in the Flag: an Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution,” and recent play, “Ghidul Copilariei Retrocedate” (“Guide to a Recovered Childhood”), which premiered recently at the International Theater Festival in Sibiu, Romania, his birthplace. 

    March 23, 2010, 4:30 pm

    Wilson Auditorium 

    Andrei Codrescu will be reading from his new book, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton University Press, 2010). Book description (Princeton UP) The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a “typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik”–one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to The Tools of Poetry (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and The Ten Muses of Poetry (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating… ), and assigns each of them a tutelary “Ghost-Companion” poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn’t actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs’s funeral procession stopped at McDonald’s, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

  • Jennifer Grotz

    Jennifer Grotz’s second book of poems, The Needle, is forthcoming in Spring 2011. Her first book of poems, Cusp, was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Bakeless Prize and also received the Natalie Ornish Best First Book Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems, essays and translations from both the French and Polish appear widely in journals such as New England Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, and in anthologies such as Best American Poetry and Legitimate Dangers. She teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester and also serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.