The ALSCW is co-sponsoring a series of readings at Boston University. All are welcome. Many thanks to Council member Meg Tyler for coordinating these fabulous events!
Peter McDonald and Phillis Levin: October 24, 6pm in the Katzenberg Center at BU College of General Studies
Peter McDonald was born and grew up in Belfast. He won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry and an Eric Gregory Award. A University teacher, he is currently Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, Oxford. A prominent critic of modern and contemporary poetry, he has published a book on Louis MacNeice, a study of Northern Irish poetry entitled Mistaken Identities, and, most recently, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill. He has edited MacNeice’s Selected Plays, and is also the editor of the forthcoming new edition of MacNeice’s Collected Poems.
Phillis Levin is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her newest book, Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2016), was selected by Library Journal as one of the Top Picks in poetry for spring 2016 and was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. She is the author of four other poetry collections, Temples and Fields (University of Georgia Press, 1988), The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995), Mercury (Penguin, 2001), and May Day (Penguin, 2008), and is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (2001). Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Bogliasco Fellowship, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Justin Quinn: November 2, 6pm in the Katzenberg Center at BU College of General Studies
Poet and translator Justin Quinn was born in Dublin, Ireland and earned his BA and PhD from Trinity College. He is the author of six collections of poetry: The Ooaa Bird (1995), Privacy (1999), Fuselage (2002), Waves and Trees (2006), Close Quarters (2011), and Early House (2015). He also wrote the novel Mount Merrion (2013). Quinn moved to Prague in the late 1990s, and his poetry often shows the influence of Anglo, American, and Irish poetry traditions as well as his experiences in the Czech Republic and as a translator of Czech poetry. His translations of poet Petr Borkovec were collected in From the Interior (2008), and Quinn is currently translating the work of Bohuslav Reynek. Quinn’s own work was translated into Czech in the collection Vlny a stromy (2009, translated by Tomáš Fürstenzeller).
Carmen Bugan, followed by a conversation with Christopher Ricks: November 13, 6pm in the Katzenberg Center at BU College of General Studies
Carmen Bugan was born in 1970 in Romania and has since lived in the US, Ireland, England, and France. She is the author of three collections of poems: Crossing the Carpathians (Oxford Poets/Carcanet), The House of Straw (Shearsman), and Releasing the Porcelain Birds (Shearsman); as well as the memoir Burying the Typewriter and the critical study ‘Séamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile’. Her essays, reviews, and poems appear in publications such as PEN, the TLS, Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, and the BBC Magazine. Carmen teaches at the Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC and lives in Long Island, NY.
David Ferry, reading from his new version of the Aeneid: December 6, 6pm in the Katzenberg Center at BU College of General Studies
David Ferry is an acclaimed American poet and translator. Ferry’s translations, which include some of the world’s major works of poetry including The Odes of Horace, and both The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, are known for their fluency and grace. In addition to his lauded translations, Ferry is also a prize-winning poet in his own right. His poetic works include Dwelling Places(1993) and Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (1999), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and was a finalist for the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and the New Yorker Book Award. Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations(2012), won the National Book Award for Poetry.
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