Poet Susan Howe Featured in Plutzik Reading Series

The spring season of The Plutzik Reading Series continues with poet Susan Howe reading selections from her works at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester's River Campus.

Howe is the author of several books of poems, including her most recent collections: The Midnight, Kidnapped, and The Europe of Trusts. Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Howe also has been a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities. She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 2000, Howe was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Howe was born in Boston in 1937 and attended the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. She has been a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1991 and currently holds the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities there.

The Plutzik Reading Series is one of the country's oldest and most prestigious literary reading programs and readings are free and open to the public. Established to honor the work of Hyam Plutzik, a distinguished poet and Deane Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric at the University, it has featured more than 175 noted writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Anthony Hecht, Elizabeth Bishop, and Galway Kinnell. The Plutzik Reading Series is administered by the Department of English. For more information, contact (585) 275-4092.