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February 8, 1999
Press Contact: Yvonne French (202) 707-9191
Public Contact: Recorded announcement (202) 707-5394

Poets Richard Howard and Mary Kinzie To Read February 25 at the Library Of Congress

Poets Richard Howard and Mary Kinzie will read from their work at the Library of Congress at 6:45 p.m. February 25 in the Mumford Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. Tickets are not required. The reading is presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund.

Mr. Howard received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1970 for his collection Untitled Subjects. He is also the author of Fellow Feelings (1976), Misgivings (1979), Lining Up (1984), No Traveller (1989), and Like Most Revelations (1994). His translations include A Lover's Discourse, by Roland Barthes (1979), which received an American Book Award nomination, and Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (1984), which won the American Book Award.

Mr. Howard is a Fellow at Morse College and at Yale University, and has served as Rhodes Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. He is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; his other awards and honors include the Harriet Monroe Prize (1969), Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize (1973), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters medal for poetry (1980), and the France-America Foundation Award for translation (1987).

Ms. Kinzie is a poet, editor, critic and teacher. She has taught the reading and writing of poetry, Victorian and modern literature, the reading and writing of fiction, and the history and theory of versification at Northwestern University since 1975, and since 1979 has served there as head of the undergraduate creative writing program. Her collections of poetry include The Threshold of the Year, which won the 1982 Devins Award for a first volume of verse; Summers of Vietnam and Masked Woman, both published in 1990; and Autumn Eros and Other Poems (1991). Her fifth collection, Ghost Ship, first published by Knopf in April 1996, was reissued in paperback in January 1998.

The Poetry and Literature Center, which administers the poetry series, is also the home of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, a position that has existed since 1936, when the late philanthropist Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. Archibald MacLeish, who was Librarian from 1939 to 1944, determined the Consultant in Poetry should be an annual appointment. Since then, many of the nation's most eminent poets have served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and, after the passage of Public Law 99-194 in 1985, as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

The 1997-1999 Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Robert Pinsky, is the award-winning translator of The Inferno of Dante and a creative writing professor at Boston University. As part of the Library's Bicentennial, Mr. Pinsky is selecting a broad cross- section of Americans reading their favorite poems aloud. In the year 2000, when the Library celebrates its 200th birthday, Mr. Pinsky will present 200 video and 1,000 audio tapes of these readings to the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature as one of the Library's birthday gifts to the nation. These readings will augment the already existing Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, which has recordings of 2,000 poets and authors reading their work. Among them are Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Interpreting services (American Sign Language, Contact Signing, Oral and/or Tactile) will be provided if requested five business days in advance of the event. Call (202) 707-6362 TTY and voice to make a specific request. For other ADA accommodations, contact the Disability Employment Office at (202) 707-9948 TTY and (202) 707- 7544 voice.

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PR 99-014
2/8/99
ISSN 0731-3527