Smith College
Office of College Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063
www.smith.edu/newsoffice

...............................................................................................................................................................

March 26, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Poet Stanley Kunitz to Read at Smith College

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.-The Poetry Center at Smith College will present poet Stanley Kunitz at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 16, in Wright Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.


Called by many "a living legend," Kunitz has published 12 books of poetry in the last 70 years. He served as poet laureate of the United States for 2000 and 2001 and at the age of 96 is considered one of America's most important and lasting voices.


Founder of both the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Poets House in New York City, Kunitz' myriad honors include the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for "Selected Poems: 1928-1958," the Bollingen Prize in 1987, the National Medal of Arts in 1993 and the National Book Award in 1995 for "Passing Through: Later Poems, New and Selected."


Born in 1905 in Worcester, Mass., Kunitz graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1926 and received his master's degree from Harvard in 1927. His first book, "Intellectual Things," was published by Doubleday in 1930; his second book, "Passport to the War," came out more than a decade later in 1944. Besides his many books of poetry, he has written essays, edited reference books for H.W.Wilson and translated writers Voznesensky, Akhmatova and others.


Kunitz has astonished the literary world by getting only better with age. Carolyn Forché calls him "a living treasure." Of Kunitz' later poems, David Barber of The Atlantic Monthly writes, "They are, in all their outward simplicity and inward mystery, perhaps the closest that American poetry has come in our time to achieving and urgency and aura that deserve-even demand-to be called visionary."


Kunitz lives in New York City and in Provincetown, Mass., where he tends his famous garden.


Kunitz' reading will be followed by a bookselling and signing. For more information, call Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413) 585-3368.


-30-

..............................................................................................................................................................

News Release Directory // News Office Home Page // Smith College Home Page

© 2001 Smith College // Please send comments to:
webmaster@smith.edu.
Page maintained by the Office of College Relations.