Pulitzer Prize winning poet to read at Centre

RELEASED: March 12, 2009

DANVILLE, KY—Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mark Strand will be at Centre College on Tuesday, March 17. He will be reading in Vahlkamp Theatre beginning at 7 p.m.

Strand has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York.

Lisa Williams, associate professor of English at Centre, says she is thrilled to have Strand reading at Centre.

"Mark Strand often draws upon the surreal for his dream-like poems that may express some dark perspective about being, about existence," Williams says. "But his poems are also wildly imaginative, tender, beautiful and darkly funny. When I come upon one of his poems, I know that it will give me a complicated pleasure; that even if the poem frightens me a little by acknowledging the bleaker aspects of what it means to be human, I will probably smile in spite of myself. Over the years, since I first began reading Strand when I was an undergraduate, his poems have brought me more enjoyment than those by any other poet of his generation."

Strand's honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from The Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel (Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (1993); The Continuous Life (1990); Selected Poems (1980); The Story of Our Lives (1973); and Reasons for Moving (1968).

He also has published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005), The Golden Ecco Anthology (1994), The Best American Poetry 1991, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (with Charles Simic, 1976).

For more information about Strand and to read a selection of his poems, click here. 

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