LOUISE GLÜCK

An Evening with Louise Glück

MONDAY, APRIL 4, 2011

Louise Glück is a former U.S. Poet Laureate (2003-2004) and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Glück's book of poems Wild Iris, published in 1992, won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is now the Rosenkranz writer-in-residence at Yale University and previously taught at Williams College for 20 years. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate in 2003.

Her fourteen books of poetry include Firstborn (1968), The House on Marshland (1975), The Garden (1976), Descending Figure (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Ararat (1990), The Wild Iris (1992), Mock Orange (1993), The First Four Books of Poems (1995), Meadowlands(1997), Vita Nova (1999), The Seven Ages (2001), Averno (2006) and A Village Life (2009). She has also written a compilation of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, published in 1994.

Glück has won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the M.I.T. Anniversary Medal and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She also received the 2008 Wallace Stevens Award for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

Robert Pinsky, the literary critic and poet, praises her poetry, saying, “Louise (Glück) sometimes uses language so plain it can almost seem like someone is speaking to you spontaneously – but it’s always intensely distinguished.”

Louise Glück is this year’s Ricardo J. Quinones Distinguished Lecturer, a lectureship established in honor of the founding director of the Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Ricardo Quinones, Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of Comparative Literature, CMC, Emeritus.