Literary lights

The roster reads like a Who’s Who of modern literature: James Baldwin, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Michael Ondaatje, Adrienne Rich, Salman Rushdie, Allen Ginsberg, Rita Dove, J. M. Coetzee, W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and John Updike, to name a few.

Since 1962, more than 300 poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers have been guests of the English department’s Plutzik Reading Series, sharing their work with students, faculty, and area community members in one of the nation’s longest-running collegiate reading programs.

Plutzik, who joined the Rochester English faculty in 1945, made it his mission to ensure that students would be able to appreciate poetry not only on the page, but also as a performative act, in which listeners would experience the excitement of an impassioned author at a podium. Although Plutzik started small—reading his own poetry to students in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library—his insistence on poetry as an experience launched a series that has featured the foremost names in literature, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, and National Book Award winners.

Read more about the Plutzik Reading Series in Rochester Review >>
additional reporting by Valerie Alhart