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March 27, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott to Read at Smith

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.--Smith College will host a poetry reading by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and emerging poet Melissa Green at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15, in Wright Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.


Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, bringing Caribbean literature to international attention. Born in St. Lucia, West Indies, of Black, Dutch, and English descent, he grew up speaking Creole patois at home and learning English in school. Author of dozens of books -- poems, essays, plays -- Walcott has garnered countless honors, including a MacArthur "genius" grant. He has transformed the imperial English of the West Indies into what poet Alison Hawthorne Deming calls "a new way of singing."


Walcott's interest in drama dates back to his college days. After graduating from the University of the West Indies, he was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theater, after which he returned to the Caribbean to found the Trinidad Theater Workshop, which produced many of his early plays. He went on to win an Obie Award for "Dream on Monkey Mountain," and his poetic dramas have been produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum and the Negro Ensemble Company.


But Walcott is best known for his lush and incantatory verse. He has been incorporating Shakespearean and biblical beauty with rich Caribbean rhythms for four decades, from the first collection, "Green Night," to the recent "Tiepolo's Hound." Walcott's epic poem "Omeros" weaves classical Greek, African, English and Island traditions into a new kind of origin myth.


Unafraid of the majestic, he also plumbs the particular, exploring cultural divisions of language and race, as well as issues of isolation and estrangement. "Either I'm a nobody, or I'm a nation," he writes, speaking to the personal and the historical at once. As author Pico Iyer suggested in Time magazine, "there is no more serious, or more sonorous, writer living." Walcott is also an accomplished painter. He teaches at Boston University, but still calls St. Lucia home.


Green is a poet's poet, quietly garnering the respect of such distinguished voices as Walcott and Joseph Brodsky, whom she translated for a recent collection of Nativity poems. Green's work has appeared in Yale Review, Agni, Paris Review and The New York Review of Books.


Her celebrated first volume, "The Squanicook Eclogues," four long poems that weave memory and landscape with an almost religious understanding of the passage of time, received the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America 1989 and the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Of "The Squanicook Eclogues," Walcott wrote, "Responsibility and delight are the tone of the true poet, a joy in the craft that supercedes its themes, however afflicted, and on every page of this book Melissa Green's reverential elations uplift and soothe the reader as naturally and cleanly as the morning wind."


Hailed by Amy Clampitt as "a born, a natural poet," Green is also the author of the harrowing and exquisite "Color is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir." She lives in Winthrop, Mass.


This reading is supported by Peggy Block Danziger and Richard Danziger and will be followed by a bookselling and signing. For more information, call Cindy Furtek in the Smith College Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, Poetry Center director, at (413) 585-3368.


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