![\"Author](\"http:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/gatenew\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/DYbyJanaBirchum-1-230x164.jpg\")
Smith College will present a reading by poet Dean Young at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 29, in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Assisted listening devices are available upon request.<\/p>\nSmith College will present a reading by poet Dean Young at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 29, in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Assisted listening devices are available upon request.<\/p>\n
An inventive and vital voice in American letters, Young first fell in love with poetry during his childhood in Pennsylvania, when in the third grade he \u201cstarted writing and never stopped.\u201d After earning his master of fine arts degree from Indiana University, Young went on to garner much recognition, including the Academy Award in Literature as well as a Stegner Fellowships from Stanford University. He has published 12 books of poetry, including, most recently, Fall Higher<\/i> and Bender: New & Selected Poems<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Young\u2019s poetry is nothing if not a marvelous conundrum. He has said that \u201cto tie too close to meaning misses the point,\u201d and to read a poem by Young is to overhear snippets of a playful conversation at once implausible and undeniably true. \u201cIf adventurous poetry can sometimes feel like a tenuous tightrope walk,\u201d wrote The Boston Globe<\/i>, \u201cYoung\u2019s poems feel more like zip lines.\u201d<\/p>\n
For more than a decade, Young lived with a degenerative heart disease.\u00a0 In 2011, just days after receiving a life-saving heart transplant, he published Fall Higher. <\/i>Written before the transplant\u2014at a time when, at its weakest point, his heart was pumping at 8 percent of what it should have been\u2014the poems in this collection are infused with an acute awareness of mortality.<\/p>\n