Purdue News
Purdue News
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April 5, 2004 Award-winning poet to speak at 73rd Literary AwardsWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Pulitzer Prize winning poet Charles Wright will speak on April 21 at this year's literary awards celebration at Purdue University.
A public reading will be at 8 p.m. in Stewart Center's Loeb Playhouse. Wright, best known for his poems about nature, also will speak at the 73rd Literary Awards Banquet from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Purdue Memorial Union's North Ballroom. Tickets, $15 for students and $21 for adults, can be purchased in Heavilon Hall, Room 324, or by calling the English department at (765) 494-3740. Ticket price includes dinner, the awards ceremony, Wright's address to award winners about the creative process, and a predinner reception on campus. The public reading is free and open to the public. "Charles Wright's poems give us dazzling images of the natural world, often as seen from the poet's very ordinary backyard," says Donald Platt, an associate professor of English and awards banquet committee chair. "His poems contain images inspired by the landscapes of Italy, Virginia and Montana, where he sometimes spends part of the summer in a small cabin in the mountains. His poems usually begin as descriptions of the weather and what he sees out his window, but quickly become meditations on memory and time, yearning for transcendence, which seems to be on the tip of his tongue, but which usually eludes him. By their close, the poems return us to an ordinary world that has been subtly transformed." Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for "Black Zodiac" and the National Book Award 1983, is the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He also is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Wright began writing poetry while a member of the Army's counterintelligence unit in Italy after World War II. His most recent books include "A Short History of the Shadow" and "Negative Blue." He also has written "Appalachia," "Black Zodiac," "Chickamauga," "The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Zone Journals," and "Country Music: Selected Early Poems." He has published two volumes of criticism, "Quarter Notes" and "Half Life." In addition, he has translated Dino Campana's "Orphic Songs" and Eugenio Montale's "The Storm and Other Poems," which was awarded the PEN Translation Prize. The public reading is sponsored by the Department of English and Purdue University Libraries. Last year's program featured Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning playwright. Kushner wrote "Angels in America." Since 1928, the English department has brought many writers to campus, including Tennessee Williams, John Irving and Louise Erdrich, to speak at the awards banquet. Writer: Amy Patterson-Neubert, (765) 494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu Source: Donald Platt, (765) 494-3727, dplatt@sla.purdue.edu Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
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