D.A. Powell will read at UConn at 6 p.m. on Thursday March 31, 2022, via Zoom.

A second online reading will be held at the The Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts on April 5. 

The UConn event on March 31 is free and open to the public. You may register here:

Acclaimed poet D.A. Powell has been praised for both his gravity and his wit. As one critic wrote, “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.” Powell’s early books Tea, (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004) are often read as a trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Powell’s fourth book, Chronic (2009), won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest collection, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (2012) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Fellow writer Carl Phillips describes Powell’s poems as “entirely of-the-moment while at every turn [announcing] … not merely an awareness, but an actual confidence with such prosodic traditions as the heroic couplet and the pentameter line, such cultural and literary traditions as those of the Old Testament and of meaningfully comic punning…. No fear, here, of heritage nor of music nor, refreshingly, of authority. Mr. Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human.” Powell has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, and is currently a Professor at the University of San Francisco.

The 56^th Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program with Claudia Rankine 

Wednesday March 13, 2019

Afternoon reading at the Greater Hartford Classical Magnet School, 85 Woodland St, Hartford
Evening reading 7 p.m., Konover Auditorium, UConn Storrs

Both readings are free and open to the public.

Claudia Rankine, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of five collections of poetry including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf 2008) and the bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf 2014), which uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images, to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a “post-racial” society. A defining text for our time, Citizen was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry. 

In all her work, whether writing about intimacy or alienation, Rankine’s voice is typified by intensity and candor. Her poetry is both innovative and thoughtful, often crossing genres as it tracks startling yet precise leaps of the mind. As the Judges Citation for the Jackson Prize notes, “The moral vision of Claudia Rankine’s poetry is astounding. In a body of work that pushes the boundaries of the contemporary lyric, Rankine has managed to make space for meditation and vigorous debate upon some of the most relevant and troubling social themes of the 20th and 21st centuries…. These poems do the work of art of the highest order—teaching, chastening, changing, astounding, and humanizing the reader.” Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.

The 55th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program: Joy Harjo
Wednesday, March 28 & Thursday, March 29, 2018

March 28: Konover Auditorium, 7:00 pm
March 29: Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, 1:30 pm

Co-sponsored with the American Studies Program, Creative Writing Program, the English Speaker’s Fund, the Hartford, UConn Humanities Institute, and the Rightors Fund. 

Joy Harjo’s eight books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry; a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. She is Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the fall of 2016, she assumed the Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Hosted by Miller Oberman and featuring Penelope Pelizzon, Darcie Dennigan, Sean Forbes, Glen MacLeod, Eleanor Reeds, and Anna Ziering. 

 

A. E. Stallings
March 8 & 9, 2017
The 54th Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program

Wednesday March 8, 7 p.m., Konover Auditorium, UConn Storrs
Thursday March 9, 10 a.m., Greater Hartford Classical Magnet School, 85 Woodland St, Hartford
Both readings are free and open to the public

This program is sponsored by The Hartford.
Additional support is provided by UConn’s English Department, the Creative Writing Program, and the Literary Translation Program, all housed in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Acclaimed American poet A.E. Stallings studied Classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. She has published three collections of poetry — Archaic Smile, Hapax, and Olives — and has been praised in The Hudson Review as the “most gifted formalist of her generation.” She is also a highly-regarded translator; the Times Literary Supplement named her verse translation of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things “one of the most extraordinary classical translations of recent times.” Stallings’s awards include a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Athens, Greece.

Carl Phillips, the 2016 Wallace Stevens Poet, was recently interviewed on NPR.  You can listen to the interview here.

The 53nd Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program with Carl Phillips at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts and the University of Connecticut

The University of Connecticut’s English Department and The Hartford are pleased to announce that Carl Phillips, the 53rd Annual Wallace Stevens Poet, will give two readings from his work, on March 22 and 23, 2016.

Mr. Phillips will read from his poems:

* At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 22 at the Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center, 405 Babbidge Road on the UConn Storrs campus.  Student winners of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Award will also be honored at the event.  The reading will preceded by a reception starting at 6 p.m. in the lounge adjacent to the Konover Auditorium.  

* And at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 23 at the CREC Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts at 15 Vernon Street in Hartford.

The readings and the reception are free and open to the public.

Described as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets,” Carl Phillips is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, criticism, and translation. His most recent books of poetry include Reconnaissance (2015), Double Shadow (2011, winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award), and Speak Low (2009, finalist for the National Book Award). His work has been anthologized in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (2003), The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000), and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1988). According to the Judges’ Citation for the 1998 National Book Awards, “Carl Phillips’s passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer’s hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts.”

Phillips’s many honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Lambda Literary Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. Phillips served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012. He is Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

The Wallace Stevens Poetry Program began in 1964 with funding from The Hartford to honor Modernist master poet Wallace Stevens, a former Vice President of The Hartford. In the last half century, the Program has brought a roster of the most important national and international poets to Connecticut. This year’s Program is sponsored by The Hartford, as well as the University of Connecticut’s English Department, Humanities Institute, and Creative Writing Program, all housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Additional support is provided by the UConn Rainbow Center.

 

The University of Connecticut’s English Department and The Hartford are pleased to announce that Susan Stewart, the 52nd Annual Wallace Stevens Poet, will give readings from her work on April 1 and 2, 2015:

Wednesday April 1, Reception 6 p.m., Dodd Center Lounge; Poetry reading 7 p.m., Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center, 405 Babbidge Road, Storrs, CT 06269;

Thursday April 2, 10 a.m., Poetry reading at Hartford Classical Magnet School, 85 Woodland Street, Hartford, CT 06103.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Poet, critic, and translator Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. Stewart’s most recent books of poems (all published by the University of Chicago Press) are Red Rover (2008), Columbarium, which won a 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Forest (1995). Her translations and co-translations include Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini (Princeton, 2009), Euripides’s Andromache (Oxford, 2001), and the poetry and prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione. In 2013 she published two co-translations with Chicago: Laudomia Bonanni’s novel The Reprisal and Milo De Angelis’s most recent books of poetry, Theme of Farewell and After-Poems. Stewart’s most recent books of criticism (also with the University of Chicago Press) are The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (2011); Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004; and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (2005), a collection of her writings on contemporary art.

A 1997 MacArthur Fellow, Stewart recently served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and four years later she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has collaborated with contemporary artists Ann Hamilton and Sandro Chia, among others. In October 2009, Stewart’s song cycle, Songs for Adam, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by composer James Primosch, was premiered by the CSO with baritone Brian Mulligan and Sir Andrew Davis conducting.

This year’s Program is sponsored by The Hartford. Additional sponsorship is provided by the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute, Creative Writing Program, Aetna Chair of Writing, and English Department, all in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Congratulations to Miller Oberman, Katherine Monica, and Amber West, the winners of this year’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. Read samples of their work here.

The University of Connecticut’s English Department and The Hartford are pleased to announce that Paul Muldoon, the 51^st Annual Wallace Stevens Poet, will give two readings from his work on April 9 and 10, 2014.

Mr. Muldoon will read at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9 at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, 15 Vernon Street in Hartford.  He will present a second reading at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 10 at the Alumni Center on the UConn Storrs Campus. Both readings are free and open to the public.

The Times Literary Supplement has called Muldoon “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” His many awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the European Prize for Poetry. The author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and criticism, Muldoon’s writing is typified by its brilliant wit and a dazzling reinvention of poetic forms.

Muldoon was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and now resides in the United States where he is poetry editor of The New Yorker and Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University.

The Wallace Stevens Poetry Program began in 1964 with funding from The Hartford to honor Modernist master poet Wallace Stevens, a former Vice President of The Hartford.  In the last half century, the Program has brought a roster of the most important national and international poets to Connecticut.  This year’s Program is sponsored by The Hartford, as well as the University of Connecticut’s English Department and the UConn Humanities Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.