Mary Oliver's poetry has been called "an excellent antidote for the excesses of civilization." Her many books -- 16 at present count -- are beloved and essential to a wide spectrum of readers.

After a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award, Oliver went on to win the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive. That book was followed by Dream Work, House Of Light, and New And Selected Poems, winner of the1992 National Book Award. Oliver's most recent poetry collections are White Pine and West Wind. She has also produced four prose works, Blue Pastures and Winter Hours, a collection of prose, prose poems, and poems, published last year by Houghton Mifflin, and two books on craft, A Poetry Handbook And Rules For The Dance.

A long-time resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Oliver holds the Catherine Osgood Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College.

Poetry Center Reading:

Spring 2000