Literary series sets schedule
Wednesdays at 4 PLUS features star-studded program for fall

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Wearing the patina burnished by repeated major national recognition, the "Wednesdays at 4 PLUS" series presented by the Poetics Program in the Department of English will, with its typical panache, present a star-studded program of readings and literary performances this fall.

The series' glitterati will include genre-twisting novelists David Foster Wallace and Samuel Delany, as well as several current and former chancellors of the Academy of American Poets-Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham and Carolyn Kizer. Kizer will present the annual Oscar Silverman Memorial Reading on Nov. 10.

A series of bilingual readings in Spanish/English and French/English by visiting guests like poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and poet Alice Notley, whose feminist epic "The Descent of Alette" has earned much critical attention, will be featured, along with presentations by artists, UB poetics students and distinguished UB faculty.

A few of the highlights:

Adrienne Rich (Oct. 18) has been an inspirational force in American poetry for more than 40 years.

A cultural icon and well-known, longtime political activist, Rich is the author of 20 books of poetry, many of which reflect political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation.

In 1999, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation and was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her previous awards include the American Academy of Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Dynamic and intellectually dazzling, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (Sept. 6) "shuns the fashionable literary postures of irony and frivolous despair to speak without embarrassment of poetry as a moral and spiritual undertaking, an instrument of discovery and awakening," wrote one critic.

The author of seven books of poetry, Graham received the Pulitzer in 1996 for "The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994."

Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, Graham also directs the poetry program in the University of Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop. In 1997, she was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Graham's many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer (Nov. 10) is the author of seven books of poetry, including "Yin"-for which she won the Pulitzer in 1984-several books of essays and the anthologies "100 Great Poems by Women" (1995) and "The Essential Clare" (1992).

She is the founder and former editor of the journal Poetry Northwest and served as the first director of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program.

A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Kizer has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, the John Masefield Memorial Award and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award.

Popular memoirist and science-fiction novelist Samuel "Chip" Delany (Oct. 11), a member of the UB Poetics Program faculty, is an influential author of science-fiction, which is surprising given his outsider status as a gay man and an African American. In the past few years, he has garnered much critical acclaim as a memoirist as well, and it is in that genre that his current interest lies.

Delany's first novel was "The Jewels of Aptor." By age 26, he had won four Nebula Awards before briefly bowing out in the late '60s to explore a musical career. He returned to write an intellectually challenging series of books that included one of his most famous and critically applauded novels, "Dahlgren," an apocalyptic tale whose bisexual theme reflected the concerns of the author's private life.

The "velvet and off-the-hook genius," novelist David Foster Wallace (Sept. 15) has a large popular and cult following. The 34-year-old savant, who has received mostly positive but sometimes frosty criticism, frequently is compared to literary superstars Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis.

Wallace is perhaps best-known for his idiosyncratic and darkly brilliant 1996 grunge novel, "Infinite Jest," 1,000-plus pages of what Newsweek critic David Gates called "epic preposterousness�(full of) salted clues and interlinked motifs with white-knuckle suspense and gross-out violence right out of Stephen King."

Click here to view the full schedule.