Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 13, 2004|Volume 32, Number 18

Louise Glück

U.S. poet laureate appointed as
Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence

Louise Glück, poet laureate of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, will be the next Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence in Yale College, Dean Richard H. Brodhead has announced.

As such, Glück will teach courses and workshops in poetry and meet with students both formally and informally while participating in all facets of campus life. Her appointment will begin in September.

"Louise Glück has won virtually every honor that can be given to a poet, and deservedly so," Brodhead commented. "She is among the most powerful poets writing today. Her reading at the recent gathering of Bollingen Prize-winners at Yale was an unforgettable experience. In addition, she has an excellent reputation as a teacher and mentor, and will make a major addition to the Yale community."

Glück became the 12th poet laureate at the Library of Congress in the fall of 2003 -- following in the literary footsteps of such poets as Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur. The one-year poet laureate's job includes delivering public readings and organizing other literary events and programs.

Glück's book "The Wild Iris," published in 1992, received the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award. "The Triumph of Achilles" (1985) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award.

Her other books of poetry include "The Seven Ages," which was awarded The New Yorker Magazine's Book Award in Poetry; "Meadowlands"; and "Ararat," which received the Library's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. This spring, Sarabande Books will publish in chapbook form a new, six-part poem titled "October."

Glück has also published a collection of essays titled "Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry," which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Non-Fiction.

In that volume in 1994, she said: "Writing is not decanting of personality. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned."

In 2001 Yale awarded Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, which is given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. In another Yale connection, Glück was named as the new judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Before coming to Yale, Glück was on the faculty at Williams College for 20 years.

She is a member of the American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, and in 1999 was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, Wellesley College's Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Anniversary Medal. In addition, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Established in 1990, the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence program brings to campus distinguished professional writers -- from fiction writers to playwrights, critics, journalists, screenwriters, essayists and social commentators -- who will enhance the University's intellectual and artistic life with their teaching and the example of their literary accomplishment. Award-winning writer Robert Stone, the most recent incumbent, held the post for 10 years.

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