John Hollander, who has published 17 books of poetry, will read from his work as part of The Plutzik Memorial Series at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25, in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester's River Campus.
Hollander's first collection of poems, A Crackling of Thorns, was chosen by W. H. Auden as the 1958 volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His subsequent works have included Visions from the Ramble (1965), The Night Mirror (1971), Tales Told of the Fathers (1975), Reflections on Espionage (1976), Spectral Emanations (1978), The Powers of Thirteen (1983), Tesserae (1992), and Figurehead (1999). His newest collection, Picture Windows, is scheduled for publication in spring 2003.
The author of eight books of literary criticism, Hollander also has collaborated on operatic and lyric works with such composers as Milton Babbitt, George Perle, and Hugo Weisgall.
His many honors include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Levinson Prize, and the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the Modern Language Association of America; in 1990 he was made a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation. Hollander is Sterling Professor of English Emeritus at Yale University.
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. It is administered by the Department of English.
Later this fall the Plutzik Series will feature internationally acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie on Oct. 12 and poets Clayton Eshleman on Oct. 16 and Carl Phillips on Oct. 30.