Award-Winning Louise Glück To Kick Off 16th Annual Women Poets At Barnard Series, Oct. 3

New York, NY, September 9, 2002—This year’s Women Poets at Barnard series will begin with a reading by the award-winning poet Louise Glück October 7, at 7 p.m. in the James Room of Barnard Hall (117th Street and Broadway).

Glück, one of America’s leading lyric poets, writes in a direct style that belies the complex themes addressed. In a poem about two friends watching a sunset, Celestial Music, she writes, "It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition/Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air/Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering—/It's this stillness we both love./The love of form is a love of endings."

"In the work of no other contemporary American poet," wrote the judges of the prestigious Bollingen Prize, "is the individual psyche so unsparingly portrayed, in both the anguish and the humor with which it confronts its profound solitude and the twin darknesses which precede birth and follow life."
"I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence," Glück writes in her essay, Disruption, Hesitation, Silence. "The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: I often wish an entire poem could be made of this vocabulary."

Glück’s distinguished career spans over 35 years, during which she has published nine books of poetry, a collection of essays and won numerous prizes. Vita Nova won the Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize, while The Wild Iris received the Pulitzer and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Ararat was awarded the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and The Triumph of Achilles won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award. Her collection of essays, Proof and Theories: Essays on Poetry won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She has also received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

A native New Yorker, Glück attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. She is currently a senior lecturer in English at Williams College.

Contact: Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-7907
James Griffith, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-1139