Lucille Clifton is one of the most beloved and respected figures in American poetry. A major voice since her 1969 publishing debut, she portrays with clarity and elegance the experiences of being an African-American, a woman, and a human. Her most recent volume, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award. The New York Times called her "a passionate, mercurial writer, by turns angry, prophetic, compassionate, shrewd, sensuous, vulnerable, and funny." Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College, Clifton was Poet Laureate of Maryland for many years.

Co-sponsored by the Black Students Alliance and
supported by a grant from the Delmas Foundation

Presented by the Department of Religion

Michael Sells is a world-renowned scholar of comparative religions and Arabic Literature and culture. His life's work spans international activism, translations of Arabic poetry, and studies in Islamic mysticism and religious intolerance. His most recent collection, Stations of Desire, brings together his own sensual yet spare poetry and elegant translations of love elegies from Ibn 'Arabi.

Richard Wilbur is the only living American poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize twice. The second Poet Laureate of the United States, he has displayed consistent eloquence and artistry and is considered America's finest poet writing in traditional meters and forms. Wilbur's literary output includes poetry, prose, children's books, essays, plays, and translations. A prolific and gifted translator of Molière, he is credited with the explosive Molière revival in North America. Wilbur served on the faculties of Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Smith, where he is Poet Emeritus. His new book of poems is Mayflies.

Supported by a gift from the Edith Oppenheimer
Richman '31 Fund

Claribel Alegría has been a formidable champion for Central America, speaking for justice and liberty in each of her 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. In the poems, Alegría's talent, courage, and commitment to freedom emerge most strongly. Her work has been translated into more than ten languages, into English most notably by Carolyn Forché and by Alegría's late husband, Darwin Flakoll. Alegría's most recent collection of poetry, Saudade ("Sorrow"), is an exquisite record of her grief after Flakoll's death. Her willingness to plumb unbearable emotions makes her a unique guide through tumult, both political and personal.

Ernesto Cardenal is a cultural icon: his writings have altered history. Priest, social activist, and former Minister of Culture in Sandinista Nicaragua, Cardenal is the most urgent and eloquent voice in a country of poets and revolutionaries. From his years of contemplation at Thomas Merton's Trappist monastery in Kentucky, to his support for the overthrow of the corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua, to his foundation of the liberationist Christian commune Solentiname and the highly successful literary workshops of the Sandinista years, Cardenal has tied poetry to his life and brought poetry to the lives of many.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs & Nosotras of Smith College and supported by a gift from Elaine Weschler Slater '47 and Jim Slater

James Tate was a 23-year-old graduate student when he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award for The Lost Pilot. A dozen subsequent collections have established him as one of the foremost American surrealists, and he has received every major honor, from the $100,000 Tanning Prize to the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Since 1971, Tate has been on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Hailed by the Village Voice as "the best American poet born in the 1940s" and by the New York Times as "an elegant, anarchic clown," Tate has also ventured into fiction. In the words of John Ashbery, Tate "never ceases to astonish, dismay, delight, confuse, tickle, and generally improve the quality of our lives."

Marie Howe writes with stunning simplicity and intimacy. Her most recent volume of poems, What the Living Do, is in large part a personal elegy to her brother John, who died of AIDS. With Michael Klein, she co-edited In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Richard McCann is the author of Dream of the Traveler, Nights of 1990, and, most recently, Ghost Letters, which received the Beatrice Hawley prize and the Capricorn Poetry Award. Fiercely passionate and deeply elegiac, his poems are, as Mark Doty writes, "posted from the zone where mortality and desire intersect." McCann lives in Washington, D.C., where he co-directs the program in Creative Writing at American University.

Supported by the Edith Oppenheimer Richman '31 Fund

The First Annual Five College Student Poetryfest is a reading in celebration of poetry at Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, featuring two students from each institution:

Billy Lopez and Evan Klavon (Amherst)
Jason Barber and Sean Bishop (Hampshire)
Olivia Bustion and Nicole Zerillo (Mount Holyoke)
Maggie Halley and Allegra Mira (Smith)
Kristina Martino and Steven Zultanski (Umass)

A reception will follow the reading.

Co-sponsored by Five Colleges, Inc.

Marilyn Chin is a self-described “hyphenated American poet,” a Chinese-American deeply engaged in the cultural processes of exile, loss, and assimilation. Her poems are influenced materially, technically, and thematically by such diverse sources as the classical Chinese tradition and the epigrams of Horace. Chin has published three collections, most recently Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, and received many awards, including a Stegner Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and four Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University. 

Supported by the Delmas Foundation

Reetika Vazirani was born in India and raised in Maryland. Her most recent collection, World Hotel, vividly portrays the clashes between mother and daughter, between lovers, between eastern and western cultures, and between colonizers and colonized. Vazirani’s first book, White Elephants, was chosen by Marilyn Hacker for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize and the “Discovery" / The Nation Award. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at the College of William and Mary, and an editor for Shenandoah. ?

Co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s Studies and Meridians

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, bringing Caribbean literature to international attention. Author of dozens of books and recipient of countless honors, including a MacArthur “genius” grant, he is also founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop and a renowned playwright. Walcott has transformed the imperial English of the West Indies into what Alison Hawthorne Deming calls “a new way of singing.”  His great epic poem Omeros weaves classical Greek, African, English, and Island traditions into a new kind of origin myth. “Either I’m a nobody, or I’m a nation,” he writes, speaking to the personal and the historical at once. Walcott teaches at Boston University, but still calls St. Lucia home.   

Melissa Green's The Squanicook Eclogues garnered the respect of such distinguished voices as Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky. This exquisite first book won the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. It was followed by the searing and tender memoir Color is the Suffering of Light. Green lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts. She has recently completed a new book of poems, and is at work on a novel.

Supported by Peggy Block Danziger & Richard Danziger