PULITZER-PRIZE-WINNING POET TO GIVE READING
AT BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

Leading American poet Charles Wright will read from his work at Bryn Mawr College on Thursday, Oct. 21, at 7:30 p.m. in Thomas Great Hall.

Free and open to the public, Wright's appearance at the College is part of a yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series featuring some of America's most gifted writers.

In a career spanning more than three decades, Wright has won many prestigious awards for his poetry, most notably the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his collection Black Zodiac.

In a New York Times review of Wright's award-winning collection, the poet Carol Muske wrote that his poems "imply the ultimate impossibility of a story yet somehow deliver, whole and integrated, a psyche, a poet's soul." She added that Wright "combines an impeccable musical and prosodic sense with the kind of humility possessed by the masters."

Born and raised in Tennessee, Wright studied history at Davidson College in North Carolina and attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, receiving a master's in fine arts from the University of Iowa. In the late 1950s, he served in the U.S. Army as a member of a counterintelligence unit in Italy, where his interest in lyric poems began.

In 1966, he taught at the University of California at Irvine and continued to write poetry. In 1968, he returned to Italy as a Fulbright scholar, lecturing at the University of Rome and the University of Padua. Since 1983 he has taught at the University of Virginia and currently holds the Souder Family Professorship in English.

His 16 collections of poems include Chickamauga, winner of the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Country Music: Selected Early Poems, which won the 1983 National Book Award; Hard Freight, a 1973 nominee for the National Book Award; Appalachia; Negative Blue and The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990. Buffalo Yoga is Wright's most recent book of poems.

Wright has also written two volumes of criticism, titled Halflife and Quarter Notes, and a translation of Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Poems, which was awarded the PEN Translation Prize. His many other honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 1999, he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Wright's reading at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry and the Whitehill-Linn Fund.

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