Acclaimed Poet J.D. McClatchy to Read and
Teach in BMC Creative Writing Program

J.D. McClatchy, a native of Bryn Mawr and an award-winning poet, essayist, editor and opera librettist, will give a reading at Bryn Mawr on Thursday, March 8, at 7:30 p.m., in the Ely Room at the Wyndham Alumnae House.

Free and open to the public, McClatchy's appearance is part of the College's yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series, which features award-winning poets, fiction and nonfiction writers and playwrights. McClatchy, who directs the creative-writing program at Yale University and edits the Yale Review, is one of four poets who, in addition to giving a public reading at Bryn Mawr, will spend several weeks teaching a master poetry class.

McClatchy's five books of poems are Hazmat, which was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; Ten Commandments; The Rest of the Way; Stars Principal and Scenes from Another Life.

He has also published two collections of essays, White Paper and Twenty Questions.

Poet W.S. Merwin has written of McClatchy's work, "The complexities and lucid articulation of feeling, the intent awareness, the informed play of language have distinguished each of his books."

In recent years, McClatchy has become as well known as a librettist as a poet, most recently writing libretti for Lorin Maazel's 1984, Ned Rorem's Our Town, Lowell Liebermann's Miss Lonelyhearts and Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel. He has also done a new translation of The Magic Flute for the Metropolitan Opera.

In an interview with the Academy of American Poets, McClatchy said he was introduced to opera by his grandmother, who would take him out of school on Fridays so the two of them could attend afternoon performances of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The reading and master class are sponsored by a gift from Florence Newman Trefethen '43 and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry. For further information, contact the Office for the Arts at 610-526-5210.

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