October 18, 1995

Contact: Craig D'Ooge (202) 707-9189

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Poet Gary Snyder To Read at the Library of Congress

On Thursday evening, November 16, Gary Snyder will read from his work in the Mumford Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Memorial Building. The reading, which is presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund, will begin at 6:45 p.m.; Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Robert Hass will introduce Mr. Snyder. Tickets are not required.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder is the author of 14 books of poetry and prose. His first collection, Riprap, appeared in 1959; his book Turtle Island (1974) received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and his most recent collection, No Nature: New and Selected Poems, was published by Pantheon Books in 1993. He received his B.A. degree from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he majored in literature and in anthropology. He performed graduate work in linguistics at Indiana University and in Oriental Languages at the University of California at Berkeley. He later traveled to Kyoto, where he worked as a researcher and translator of Buddhist texts. During his 12 years in Japan, Mr. Snyder traveled to India with Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Joanne Kyger. For the last 20 years, Mr. Snyder has been living in the northern Sierra Nevada on the edge of the Tahoe National Forest. He is on the faculty of the University of California at Davis.

Gary Snyder's poems reflect his longtime practice of Zen Buddhism, offering a clarity of vision that makes them accessible to his diverse readers. A Los Angeles Times Book Review essay describes him as "the master of lucid meditation.... His sense of the history of land and cultures and his ability to write as both the Worker and the Thinker creates a fertile whole."

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PR 95-140
10/18/95
ISSN 0731-3527