Celebrated poet Frank Bidart will give public reading

Celebrated poet Frank Bidart, author of Desire and Watching the Spring Festival, will present a pair of events at Washington University in St. Louis Tuesday, March 23, and Thursday, March 25.

Bidart, who is on campus as the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will speak on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 23. He then will present a reading from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 25.

Both events — part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series — are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall.

Born in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1939, Bidart studied at the University of California, Riverside, and at Harvard University, where he was a student and friend of poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

His first collection, Golden State, was published in 1973 as part of the Braziller Poetry Series and was followed by The Book of the Body (1977) and The Sacrifice (1983). All three volumes were then gathered, along with new poems, in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990).

Bidart’s next volume, Desire (1997), was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, while Music Like Dirt (2002) was the first chapbook ever nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent volumes are Star Dust (2005) and Watching the Spring Festival (2008). In addition, Bidart served as co-editor of Lowell’s Collected Poems (2003).

Bidart’s many honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review’s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” in 1981. In 2003 he was elected a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and teaches at Wellesley College.

Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle. A reception and book signing will follow each event. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or e-mail David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.