FEMINIST POET AND ESSAYIST ADRIENNE RICH TO READ

One of America's most influential poets, Adrienne Rich, will give a reading at Bryn Mawr on Thursday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. in Thomas Great Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

The author of more than 16 volumes of poetry and four books of nonfiction, Rich has been the recipient of nearly every major literary award, including the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, often called the "genius" award. Her most recent collection of poems, The School Among the Ruins, won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award. She refused the 1997 National Medal for the Arts for political reasons.

Since her first book of poetry, A Change of World, was selected for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1951, Rich has become one of this country's most influential writers on the politics of sexuality, race, language and women's culture. Many of the political and feminist themes contained in her later work first appeared in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954-1962, which reflects the tensions she experienced as a wife and mother in the 1950s. Her next three books, Necessities of Life, Leaflets and The Will to Change, convey the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1980s, many of Rich's books, including Your Native Land, Your Life and Time's Power, examined her relationship to her Jewish heritage. In addition to her poetry, Rich has written several essays on poetry, feminism, lesbianism and motherhood.

This program has been made possible through a major grant from the Heinz Family Philanthropies. Rich's reading at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry, the Lucy Martin Donnelly Women Writers Series Fund, the Department of English, the Feminist and Gender Studies Program and the 1902 Fund. 

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