Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 25, 2008|Volume 36, Number 27

Reading will feature recent winners of Yale Series of Younger Poets competition

Five poets — the most recent winners of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition — will read from their work on campus on Friday, May 2.

The event will take place at 4 p.m. in Rm. 208 at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. Sponsored by Yale University Press and the Whitney Humanities Center, the reading is free and open to the public.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate Louise Glück will introduce and moderate the event. She is the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale and is also the current judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

The featured poets for the event and the year they received the award are: Peter Streckfus, 2003; Richard Siken, 2004; Jay Hopler, 2005; Jessica Fisher, 2006; and the latest winner, Dr. Fady Joudah, 2007.

Streckfus teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama. His prize-winning book, “The Cuckoo,” received much positive critical attention, including this from the Virginia Quarterly Review: “The pleasures in ‘The Cuckoo’ are many; Streckfus’ sense of humor is quite fetching, as are his social awareness lyrics.”

Siken’s book, “Crush,” in addition to receiving the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, won a Lambda Literary Award and the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In a review in the literary journal Rain Taxi, his book was described as an “explosive, frantic splash of language and imagery.”

Hopler, who teaches at the University of South Florida and is the editor of a forthcoming anthology of poetry by younger Americans, is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of poems “Green Squall.” Publishers Weekly called the poems in the book “truly stunning.”

Fisher recently received her doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The New Yorker described her book “Frail-Craft,” as “an intelligent, often playful collection.”

Joudah is a medical doctor in Houston who is active in the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. His book, “The Earth in the Attic,” is, in the author’s own words, “a book of exile ... a metaphor for current psychic reality.”

Awarded since 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize celebrates the most prominent new American poets by bringing the work of previously unpublished artists to the attention of the larger public. Previous winners of the prize include such talents as Adrienne Rich, John Ashberry and Robert Hass. It is the longest-running poetry prize in the United States.

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

U.S. governors call for federal action on climate change . . .

Law School boosts support for careers in public service

City youths to flex their mathematical muscles in contest

Fertility expert finds genetic markers that are linked with . . .

Divinity student’s books pay homage to architectural marvels

United Way honors the University and staff member . . .

Ways to curb ovarian cancer’s resistance to chemotherapy . . .

Yale Rep stages world premiere of ‘Boleros for the Disenchanted’

Program seeks to build bridges of religious environmentalism

Conference aims to spark ‘new American conversation’ . . .

Reading will feature recent winners of Yale Series of . . .

Photography exhibit highlights culture of Uyghur people of China

Dr. Gerald Shulman lauded for his pioneering work on insulin resistance

Amy Arnsten wins national grant for research on . . .

Yale hosts delegation from China’s Food and Drug Administration

New director of development for School of Music is appointed

IN MEMORIAM

Dr. Steven Hebert: Discoveries illuminated kidney processes

G.K. Hunter: Was a scholar of Renaissance literature