Fall 2020 Poetry Readings and Lectures Sponsored by the Marie Frazee Baldassarre Professorship

Wednesday 28th October 10:45 a.m.

Jenny Xie’s first book Eye Level (2018) received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University; was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (2017) was awarded the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has taught creative writing at Princeton and NYU; she is now a faculty member at Bard College. Her poetry is subtle, brilliant, philosophically complex, and unlike any other poetry you’ve ever read.

Wednesday 18th November 10:45 a.m.

Paul Muldoon’s poetry has won more awards than there is space on this page to list; the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer are among the best known. Born in Northern Ireland in 1951 and living in the U.S. since 1987, Muldoon is considered one of the most important poets of any nationality. His complex, witty poems are a delight to read, and teach. Those who don’t already know his poetry might want to look at One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, Meeting the British, Quoof, or his Selected Poems 1968-2014.

Wednesday 11th November 6:45 p.m.

“Constance Markievicz: aristocrat, artist, socialist, revolutionary”
Professor Lauren Arrington of Maynooth University, Ireland, is the author of Revolutionary Lives (2016), an acclaimed double-biography of Irish rebel Constance Markievicz, née Gore-Booth, and her husband, Polish count and revolutionary Casimir Markievicz. Arrington’s other books include W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State (Oxford University Press, 2010 ), and The Poets of Rapallo: Late Modernist Writing in Mussolini’s Italy (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). With Matthew Campbell, she is editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats, and she is serving as a director of the Yeats International Summer School from 2018-2021.

Wednesday 2nd December, 5:30 p.m.

“The Twice-Strung Harp: Irish Language Poetry in English Translation”
Professor Maureen O’Rourke Murphy is one of the most important scholars of Irish Studies in the U.S. She is the author of Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine, co-editor of Irish Literature: A Reader, and past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and past chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. Her project The Great Irish Famine Curriculum (2001) won the Project Excellence Award from the National Council of the Social Studies in 2002. Murphy is Professor Emerita of Teaching, Learning and Technology at Hofstra University.

Wednesday 2nd December, 6:45 p.m.

“Reviving Women” – poetry & songs celebrating the women who fought for suffrage, liberty and equality in 1916 and beyond
Catherine Ann Cullen is the inaugural Poet-in Residence at Poetry Ireland; she is also a musician and the author of several children’s books. The Other Now (Dedalus Press, 2017) is the most recent selection of her poems. Her verse-stories for children include the Magical, Mystical, Marvelous Coat and Thirsty Baby. Cullen has also made many documentaries for RTÉ radio and has produced features on the arts and current affairs.