Louise Glück to read March 10

Former U.S. poet laureate among most acclaimed writers of her generation

One of the most acclaimed writers of her generation, Louise Glück has, over the last four decades, received virtually every major honor available to a U.S. poet, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Wallace Stevens Award for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

At 8 p.m. Thursday, March 10, Glück, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will read from her work as part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series.

The talk is free and open to the public and will take place in Whitaker Hall Auditorium, located at the intersection of Forest Park Parkway and Hoyt Drive. A reception and book signing will immediately follow her reading.

For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or e-mail David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.

U.S. poet laureate from 2003-04, Glück was born in New York in 1943 and attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Her debut collection, Firstborn (1968), established her as a significant poetic voice and was followed by The House on Marshland (1975) and Descending Figure (1980).

Glück’s next collection, The Triumph of Achilles (1985), received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award. It was followed by Ararat (1990), for which she received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and The Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award.

Other collections include Meadowlands (1996); Vita Nova (1999), winner of The New Yorker magazine’s Book Award in Poetry; The Seven Ages (2001); and Averno (2006), which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2006 and was listed by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. Her most recent collection is A Village Life (2009).

In addition, Glück has published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. A chapbook, October, was published by Saraband Books in 2003.

Glück’s honors also include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), M.I.T. Anniversary Medal (2000), the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award (2007) and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Currently Rosenkranz writer-in-residence at Yale University, Glück previously taught at Williams College. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has been a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. In 2007, Glück was reappointed for a five-year term as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

CALENDAR SUMMARY

WHO: Poet Louise Glück

WHAT: Reading from her work

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 10

WHERE: Whitaker Hall Auditorium, located at the intersection of Forest Park Parkway and Hoyt Drive

COST: Free and open to the public

INFORMATION: (314) 935-7130 or dschuman@wustl.edu