Two back-to-back events will conclude the spring season of the Plutzik Reading Series at the University of Rochester.
On Monday, April 21, poet, critic, and English professor James Longenbach will read from his works at 8 p.m. in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library. On Wednesday, April 23, novelist Rick Moody will give a reading at 8 p.m. in Lander Auditorium in Hutchison Hall. Both events on the River Campus are free and open to the public.
Longenbach is Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University and a literary critic acclaimed for his writing on Modernist poets and poetry. His own first collection of poems, Threshold, was well received when it was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1998. His second book, Fleet River, is due out this month.
Longenbach's research in modern literature has produced four books of literary criticism, including the highly regarded Modern Poetry after Modernism and Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. He has had numerous articles and reviews appear in such publications as Southwest Review, New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The Yale Review.
Longenbach has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, as well as the Discover/Nation prize for poetry.
Moody's novels include Garden State, winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press, and Purple America. His 1994 novel, The Ice Storm, was made into a movie directed by Ang Lee.
Moody is also the author of two collections of short stories, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and Demonology. His memoir, The Black Veil, was published in 2002, and his fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Grand Street, Details, and the New York Times.
Moody is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Plutzik Series is one of the country's oldest and most prestigious literary reading programs. 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, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, and Galway Kinnell. The Plutzik Series is administered by the Department of English. For more information, call (585) 275-4092.