Poet and academic critic Linda Gregerson will launch the 1999-2000 Hyam Plutzik Memorial Poetry Series at the University of Rochester with a reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 21, in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library on the River Campus.
Gregerson is the author of two books of poems, Fire in the Conservatory and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep. Her work in The Woman, an exploration of suffering, grace, and perseverance in the face of disease and mortality, was praised as "skillful, intelligent, and thoughtful . . . at once wounding and redemptive" by The Boston Review.
Gregerson's poems, reviews, and essays have been published in The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, and other journals. She is the recipient of the Isabel MacCaffrey Award from the Spenser Society of America, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Levinson Prize from Poetry.
An associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at the University of Michigan, Gregerson also has written The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic, a book about Renaissance poetry. In addition, she was a staff editor in poetry at The Atlantic Monthly.
Gregerson will also give a lecture, "Ben Jonson and the Loathed Word," at 12:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 22, in the Welles-Brown Room as part of the English department's Colloquium Series. Both events are free and open to the public.
The Plutzik Series, one of the country's oldest and most prestigious literary reading programs, was established in 1962 to honor the work of Hyam Plutzik, a distinguished poet and Deane Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric at the University.