Poet and translator Heather McHugh, visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, will speak on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 28.
In addition, McHugh will read from her poetry at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 30.
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WHO: Poet and translator Heather McHugh WHAT:Talk on the craft of poetry (Sept. 28), reading from her poetry (Sept. 30) WHEN: 8 p.m. both evenings WHERE: Hurst Lounge, Room 201 Duncker Hall, northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Hoyt and Brookings Drive COST: free and open to the public INFORMATION: (314) 935-7130 |
Both events, part of the Writing Program Reading Series, take place in Hurst Lounge in Duncker Hall, Room 201, on the northwest corner of Brookings quadrangle on the Washington University campus. Both are free and open to the public with receptions to follow. Copies of McHugh’s books will be available for purchase after the Thursday reading. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.
McHugh is the author of more than 10 books, including the poetry collections Eyeshot (2003); The Father of Predicaments (1999); and Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, a National Book Award finalist. Other volumes include the essay collection Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993) and translations of Euripides’ Cyclops (2001) and Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (2000), the latter with her husband, Nikolai Popov.
“Heather McHugh’s poems pivot on riffs of surround sound, but in the center of the eddy are life’s most pressing questions. About sex, love, lust. About perception and mentation,” said Mary Jo Bang, associate professor of English and poet on the faculty of The Writing Program at Washington University. “She’s a consummate wordsmith whose sense of play and intelligence drives the poems to their always right but ever surprising conclusions: ‘Is love / only cupidity? (In a silver twist, / a spire’s unfixed. Now it’s a spear.)'”
McHugh’s honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pollock/Harvard Book Review Prize and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and in 2001 was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Seattle, where she is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington.