Two Pulitzer Prize-winning poets at Grand Valley

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Two Pulitzer Prize-winning poets: one Mississippi-born, the other a native of Northern Ireland, will be featured at Grand Valley State University as the final Fall Arts Celebration 2008 event.

Poetry Night, “An Evening of Poetry and Conversation with Natasha Trethewey and Paul Muldoon,” will be on Wednesday, October 29, at 7 p.m., in the L.V. Eberhard Center, second floor, 301 W. Fulton, on the Pew Grand Rapids Campus. Admission is free and open to the public.
   
“Both of these writers are overwhelmingly concerned with the recovery or preservation of a person’s life or the past,” said Grand Valley’s Poet-in-Residence and coordinator of this event, Patricia Clark. “They each make use of memory, history and language to understand, underscore, mourn and also celebrate.”  

Trethewey is a distinguished chair in poetry at Emory University. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best, first book by an African American poet, and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
   
The title of Trethewey’s Native Guard (winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry) is named after one of the first black regiments marshaled into service during the Civil War. Her work explores the complex memory of the American South while also giving voice to universal themes of yearning and hope.
      
Born in County Armagh in Northern Ireland, Muldoon is currently a distinguished professor of humanities at Princeton University and professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. In May, Muldoon was given an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters by the American University of Paris and was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was recently appointed poetry editor of The New Yorker.
     
His work includes Moy Sand and Gravel (winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry) and Horse Latitudes, (2006), his 10th collection of poetry. Critics have called Muldoon the most significant English-language poet born since World War II, a master of the quantum leap of linguistic intelligence. They also describe his work as wicked, stylish and fun.

For more information, contact Patricia Clark in the Department of Writing, at (616) 331-3199, or visit www.gvsu.edu/fallarts.