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Witter Bynner fellows to read at New York State Library on October 24, 2008
Matthew Thorburn and Monica Youn, winners of the 2008 Witter Bynner poetry fellowships from the Library of Congress, will give a poetry reading in the Carol Huxley Theater in the New York State Museum on Friday, October 24, 2008 at 7:00 p.m. The event, sponsored by the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, the New York Center for the Book, and the New York State Library, is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the reading.
Chosen by Poet Laureate Charles Simic, Thorburn and Youn each received a $10,000 fellowship, provided by the Library of Congress with funding from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A condition of the prize is that winners give a reading in their home state during the year and both chose to read in Albany.
Matthew Thorburn is also a business-development writer for an international law firm in New York City. His first book, Subject to Change, was published in 2004. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review and other journals. Thorburn founded and co-edited the poetry journal Good Foot (2000-2004). His work has been recognized with the Mississippi Review Prize and the Belfast Poetry Festival’s inaugural Festivo Prize. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the MFA program at The New School. He is currently at work on a second book of poems.
Monica Youn is also an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and an adjunct assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She is the author of Barter (2003). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Norton Anthology: Language for a New Century. Youn holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, a master’s of philosophy from Oxford, and a law degree from Yale. She was the recipient of a Rhodes scholarship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University.
The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry was incorporated in 1972 in New Mexico to provide grant support for programs in poetry through nonprofit organizations. Witter Bynner was an influential early-20th-century poet and translator of the Chinese classic "Tao Te Ching." He worked at McClure’s Magazine, where he published A.E. Housman for the first time in the United States, and was one of O. Henry’s early fans.
For further information on Witter Bynner fellowships and the poetry program at the Library of Congress, visit www.loc.gov/poetry/. To learn more about the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and its affiliated network of state centers, visit www.loc.gov/cfb. For information on this event, contact Pamela McLaughlin, director of the New York Center for the Book at (315) 443-9788 or email pwmclaug@syr.edu.
