Poet Vijay Seshadri, a winner of the James Laughlin Award, will give a reading at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7, in Lander Auditorium in Hutchison Hall on the University of Rochester's River Campus as part of The Plutzik Series.
The Plutzik Series is one of the country's oldest and most prestigious literary reading programs and was 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.
Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and moved to America five years later. He has lived in the Pacific Northwest—where he spent time working in the fishing and logging industries—and in New York City. Seshadri holds a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University. He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
A writer often praised for his elasticity, wit, and intimacy of tone, Seshadri has published poems, essays, and reviews in AGNI, Antaeus, Boulevard, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, Verse, and Western Humanities Review. His poems also appear in many anthologies including Under 35: the New Generation of American Poets and The Best American Poetry 1997 and 2003.
One of Seshadri's collections of poetry, Wild Kingdom, creatively compares history with wilderness and was published in 1996 by Graywolf Press. His other collection, The Long Meadow, won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2003.
Additionally, Seshadri is the recipient of The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and The MacDowell Colony's Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement and has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Seshadri's reading is scheduled during Meliora Weekend, the University's annual tradition of celebrating homecoming, alumni reunions, and family weekend together. The Plutzik Series is administered by the Department of English and is free and open to the public. For more information, contact (585) 275-4092.