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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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