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Lewis Hyde
Tuesday, October 5th
4:10pm • Cheever Room, Finn House
Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. In 2010, he published Common As Air, a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce.
Matt Hart and Nate Pritts
Thursday, Oct 21st
4:10pm • Cheever Room, Finn House
Hart is the author of Who’s Who Vivid, from Slope editions, You Are Mist forthcoming from Moor Books, as well as multiple chapbooks. He is editor of Forklift, Ohio. Pritts is the author of The Wonderfull Yeare, (Cooper Dillon), Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press) and Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX), as well as multiple chapbooks. He is the editor of H_NGM_N.
Forrest Gander
Friday, November 5th
7:30pm • Peirce Lounge, Peirce Hall
The author of numerous books of poetry, novels, essays and translations, Gander’s most recent publications include As a Friend (fiction) and Eye Against Eye (poems) from New Directions, and A Faithful Existence (essays) from Counterpoint Press. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations. In 2011 New Directions will publish Core Samples From The World, a new collection of poetry.
Jean Portante
Saturday, November 6th
3:10pm • Bemis Music Room, Peirce Hall
Portante is a poet, novelist, translator and journalist. He has written over twenty books, which include collections of poems, short stories, plays, screenplays, chronicles and novels, and he has been translated into several languages. He is the director of the ‘Graphiti’ series of poetry in Editions PHI, and the editor of the weekly Le Jeudi.
In 2006, he was elected a member of the French Académie Mallarmé. His most recent titles include: Mourir partout sauf à Differdange, novel (Editions PHI, Luxembourg: 2003) and L’étrange langue, poems (Le Taillis Pré, Namur: 2002).
W.S. Merwin
Saturday, November 6th
8pm • Rosse Hall
Merwin was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2010. His latest collection of poetry, The Shadow of Sirius, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. He will be honored in 2010 with the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. In 1954, he was awarded a Kenyon Review Fellowship from John Crowe Ransom, receiving one year of financial support early in what would become an extraordinary literary career.
