Keynote Speaker Archives

2007 Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan's sixth book of poems, The Niagara River, was published in 2005 by Grove Press. This year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets . Her previous books include Say Uncle (2000), and Elephant Rocks (1996), also from the Grove Press Poetry Series. Her book Flamingo Watching, Copper Beech (1995) was a finalist for both the Lamont Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received a BA and MA from UCLA. Since l971 she has lived in Marin County. Her awards include the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (The Poetry Foundation), a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, an NEA Fellowship, the Union League Poetry Prize (Poetry Magazine), the Maurice English Poetry Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. Ms. Ryan's work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, and many other journals and anthologies. Entertainment Weekly has named her to their “It List”; her work has been used in the Sunday funnies; and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York 's Central Park Zoo.

"No new poet has so deeply impressed me with her imagination flair or originality as Kay Ryan...She rouses her readers from conventional response and expectation."
-Dana Gioia

2006 James Fenton

James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent and columnist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry (1994-1999). His earliest volumes of verse appeared during his undergraduate years: Our Western Furniture (1968) and Put Thou Thy Tears Into My Bottle (1969). He has published several collections of poetry, as well collections of essays, a travel book, and opera libretti. His recent libretto for Salmon Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, music by Charles Wuorinen, debuted in 2005. The Love Bomb and Other Musical Pieces, a collection of his libretti, was published by Penguin (2005). His reviews appear regularly in The New York Review of Books.

"Mr. Fenton has already written four or five of the poems future anthologists will squabble over.”
William Logan, The New York Times Book Review

“…the craft, the techniques have been tuned and turned and made ready.”
Anthony Thwaite, The Sunday Telegraph (London)

“…a strong, fresh, pleasant wind blowing away the convoluted miasmas of most of his contemporaries…”
Hilary Corke, The Spectator

2005 Anne Stevenson

Anne Stevenson, born in Cambridge, England in 1933, was brought up in the United States. She attended schools in New Haven and Ann Arbor, graduating from the University of Michigan (1954) with a Major Hopwood Award for Poetry. In 1961 she took a Master's Degree in English from Michigan, but since then she has mainly lived and worked in Great Britain. Oxford University Press has published nine collections of her poetry, including The Collected Poems, 1955 - 1995. Her collection, Granny Scarecrow, was shortlisted in 2001 for the Whitbread and Eliot Prizes. In 2002 she was awarded Britain's largest literary prize, the £60,000 Northern Rock Writers Award. A recent collection, A Report from the Border, was published by Bloodaxe Books (2003). This will be followed in May, 2005 by a major collection, Poems 1955-2005 . Having served as writer in residence in Dundee, Oxford, Edinburgh and Newcastle, Anne Stevenson has written extensively on Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop. She lives with her huband, Peter Lucas, in Durham and North Wales.

"She is one of the greatest women artists in the country" -- Peter Levi Poetry Review

"One of the most intelligent, assured, vivid and skilful poets writing today." Gerard Woodward
Times Litlerary Supplement

2004 Dana Gioia

Poet, critic, and best-selling anthologist, Dana Gioia is one of America 's leading contemporary men of letters. Winner of the American Book Award, Gioia is internationally recognized for his role in reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry. He has published three full-length books of poetry including Daily Horoscope (1986); The Gods of Winter (1991), chosen by London's Poetry Society Book Club as its main selection; and Interrogations at Noon (2001), winner of the American Book Award. Gioia's critical collection , Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992/2002) was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the “Best Books of 1992.” Gioia's poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. He is also a longtime commentator on American culture and literature for BBC Radio. Author of the libretto for Nosferatu (2001), an opera created with composer Alva Henderson, Gioia's poem, “The End,” was recently set to music by award-winning composer Ned Rorem. In February 2003 Gioia was appointed by President George W. Bush as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. A native of California, he lives in Washington with his wife, Mary, and their two sons.

2003 William Jay Smith

William Jay Smith, the author of more than fifty books of poetry, translation, children's books and literary criticism, has a distinguished publishing career spanning fifty-two years. His poetry publications include The World Beneath the Window: Poems 1937-1997 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), The Cherokee Lottery: A Sequence of Poems and What You Have Almost Forgotten: Selected Poems of Gyula Illyés (both by Curbstone Press). He has received awards from the French Academy and the Swedish Academy. For his outstanding contributions to the promotion of Hungarian culture, he has twice received awards from the government of Hungary—The Gold Medal for Labor and the Pro Cultura Hungarica Award. Two of his ten collections of poetry were final contenders for the National Book Award, and he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position now called Poet Laureate) from 1968 to 1970. He divides his time between Cummington, MA, and Paris.

From 2001 Books and Authors, Curbstone Press online.

2002 Nina Cassian

Nina Cassian was born in 1924 in Galati, Romania. She has published over fifty books, including Life Sentence: Selected Poems, edited by William Jay Smith, plus works of fiction and books for children. She is also a composer of classical music (chamber and symphonic) and has been a journalist, film critic, and translator of Shakespeare, Bertold Brecht, Christian Morgenstern, Iannis Ritsos, and Paul Celan. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, and American Poetry Review. Exiled from Romania in 1985, she is currently working on her memoirs and lives in New York City. (Courtesy of Norton Poets Online)

Poetry in English: Take My Word for It (1998); Cheerleader For A Funeral: Poems (1995); Call Yourself Alive (1992); Life Sentence: Selected Poems, edited by William Jay Smith (1990); Lady of Miracles (1982); The Blue Apple (1981).

Poetry in Romanian: On the Scale of One to One (La scala 1/1); Our Soul (Sufletul Nostru); Vital Year, 1917 (An viu, noua sute sisaptesprezece); horea not alone anymore (Horea nu mai esta singur); Youth (Tinerete); Selected Poems (Versuri alese).

2001 Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson graduated from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (M.A.) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D.). Her books are For the Body (1978), Mama's Promises (1985), The Homeplace (1990), Magnificat (1994), and The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), and two collections of verse for children.

Honors include two Pushcart Prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award. The Homeplace was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award and won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award. The Fields of Praise was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and won the 1998 Poets' Prize. Her latest work, a rendition of Euripides' play, "Hecuba," appears in Euripides I, the first volume of the Penn Greek Drama Series. She is professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

2000 Louis Simpson

Educated at Munro College (Jamaica, West Indies) and at Columbia, where he received his doctorate, Louis Simpson has taught at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. With Donald Hall and Robert Pack, he edited the celebrated anthology New Poets of England and America (1957) and he is the author and editor of the textbook An Introduction to Poetry (1968). He has received the Rome Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and letters, a Hudson Review Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Like many other poets of his generation, Simpson began his poetic career as a formalist and gradually worked toward a verse in which content primarily determines form. In the process, his own language has become increasingly natural and closer to the colloquial idiom of American speech—a language "closely related to the language in which men actually think and speak."' At the same time, both his language and his view of the American experience—the root source of much of his poetry—have retained an educated and literate edge that informs his poems with a fully conscious sense of history and tradition.

Reading Simpson's poetry, one might be reminded of Robert Frost's famous aphorism about his lovers-quarrel with the world. No less a lover, Simpson's quarrel is more specifically with America. It is an ongoing struggle to come to grips with the pathetic or tragic failure of the American dream and myth— especially as announced by Whitman. "Where are you, Walt? / The Open Road goes to the used-car lot," he says in 'Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain." The open road also leads to the suburbs where, it seems, "You were born to waste your life." Simpson's grief is further intensified by his realization that the American dream has been perverted into a weapon capable of destroying not only supposed enemies but also America itself, which has become a foreign country where people speak a language that is strange even to themselves. "And yet there is also happiness. / Happiness . . ." A discovery of a music, even if it is "made entirely of silence." (Reprinted from Contemporary American Poetry, Sixth Edition, A.Poulin, Jr., Ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston,1996.)

Poetry: The Arrivistes: Poem 1940 -1949 (1949). Good News of Death and Other Poems, in Poets of Today II, with Norma Faber and Robert Pack (1955). A Dream of Governors (1959). At the End of the Open Road (1963). Selected Poems (1965). Adventures of the Letter I (1971). Searching for the Ox (1976). Armidale (1980). Caviare at the Funeral (1980). The Best Hour of the Night (1983). People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-1983 (1983). Collected Poems (1988). Poems/Drawings (1989). In the Room We Share (1990). Jamaica Poems (1993). Dream of Governors: Poems (1994). There You Are (1994). Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology (1997).

Prose: James Hogg: A Critical Study (1962). Riverside Drive, a novel (1962). North of Jamaica, autobiography (1972). Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams (1975). A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell (1978). A Company of Poets (1981). The Character of the Poet (1986). Selected Prose, autobiography, fiction, literary criticism (1989). Ships Going into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry (1994). The King My Father's Wreck, autobiography (1994).

1998 Wendy Cope

1996 Donald Justice

1995 Richard Wilbur