October 20, 1998

Contact:
Contact: Yvonne French (202) 707-9191

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Seven Washington Poets To Read at the Library of Congress

Washington-area poets Michael Collier, Carolyn Forché, E. Ethelbert Miller, Linda Pastan, Stanley Plumly, Jane Shore and Henry Taylor will read from their work at the Library of Congress at 6:45 p.m. November 4 in the Coolidge Auditorium on the ground floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, at 10 First St. S.E. Tickets are not required.

The program is presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund.

Mr. Collier teaches English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of The Clasp and Other Poems and The Folded Heart and the editor of The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry.

Ms. Forché is the author of The Angel of History (1994); The Country Between Us, which was the 1982 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976). Most recently, she has published an anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth- Century Poetry of Witness. She teaches at George Mason University.

Mr. Miller has been the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University since 1974. He is the author of many collections of poems, including Andromeda (1974) and First Light (1994). He is also the editor of anthologies, including In Search of Color Everywhere (1994), which won the 1994 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award.

Ms. Pastan, Poet Laureate of Maryland 1991-1995, is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including A Perfect Circle of Sun (1971), The Five Stages of Grief (1978), A Fraction of Darkness (1985), The Imperfect Paradise (1988), An Early Afterlife (1995) and, most recently, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998).

Mr. Plumly's first collection of poems, In the Outer Dark (1970), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; his third, Out-of-the-Body Travel (1976), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the William Carlos Williams Prize. His most recent book is The Marriage in the Trees (1997). He is a member of the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Maryland.

Ms. Shore's works include Eye Level (1977), The Minute Hand (1987), and Music Minus One (1996). The recipient of many awards, including two Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards and grants from the Massachusetts Endowment for the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is on the faculty of the English Department at George Washington University.

Mr. Taylor, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his 1986 book, The Flying Change, is professor of literature and co-director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at American University. His most recent collection is Understanding Fiction: Poems, 1986-1996.

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. He suggests authors to read in the literary series, plans other special events during the literary season, and usually introduces the programs.

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 98-171
10/20/98
ISSN 0731-3527