The Role of the Poet in Our Times

A Reading and Lecture by Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Jorie Graham

The Role of the Poet in Our Times

Please join us for a reading and lecture by the Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship winning poet Jorie Graham. She will read her own and others’ work and speak about the importance of poetry and the humanities in today’s world at the 2016 Vernon and Margarette Gras Lecture in the Humanities.

This event is free and open to the public and will be held on George Mason’s Fairfax Campus, at the Center for the Arts in the Grand Tier III Ballroom on Thursday, April 21st, from 7:30 – 9:30 P.M. Refreshments will be provided.

The Vernon and Margarette Gras Lecture in the Humanities features eminent scholars whose work is dedicated to pressing issues in humanities and issues of importance to scholarship and the world at large.

 

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never(2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language(1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990.

Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Biographical information excerpted from www.joriegraham.com, where more information about Ms. Graham may be found.

 

This event is brought to you by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program, and the GMU Folklore Roundtable.

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