Released: Jan. 7, 2000

U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky to keynote Centre College Founders Day

DANVILLE, KY -- Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States and a regular contributor to the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, will serve as keynote speaker for Centre College Founders Day on Wednesday, Jan. 19. Pinsky has titled his remarks "The Sounds of Poetry."

The Founders Day program will begin at 11 a.m. in the Norton Center for the Arts. During the program, Centre will confer an honorary degree on Pinsky.

The public is invited to attend.

Pinksy also will meet with Centre students in an informal poetry class on the Tuesday afternoon prior to his public address.

Founders Day is held each year at Centre to celebrate the anniversary of the college's founding. Centre received its charter from the Kentucky legislature on Jan. 21, 1819.

Pinsky is the thirty-ninth Poet Laureate of the United States, a designation honoring the magnitude and impact of his work. His volume The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1965-95, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The book received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union.

Another of Pinsky's works, the book-length poem An Explanation of America, received the Saxifrage Prize when it was published in 1980 and recently was published in a new edition by Princeton University Press. Pinsky won the William Carlos Williams Prize for History of My Heart, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry for a new translation of the Inferno of Dante.

Among his other works are Sadness and Happiness, The Handbook of Heartbreak and The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide.

Pinsky's poetry and literary criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The New Yorker, Paris Review and The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. He has taught at Wellesley and Berkeley and currently teaches at Boston University.

Pinsky is one of three distinguished visiting lecturers at Centre this year funded through the Humana Scholars program. The Humana Scholars are funded by earnings from an endowment

created through a gift to the college from The Humana Foundation. The foundation is the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., a health care corporation based in Louisville.

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Communications Office
Centre College
600 W. Walnut Street
Danville, KY 40422

Coordinator of public information: Patsi Barnes Trollinger
Telephone 606-238-5719 - trllngrp@centre.edu