Posts Tagged literature

The United Nations created World Poetry Day to celebrate poetic expression in the world’s many languages. In honor of the day, University of Rochester students at the Language Center share some favorite poems in the languages in which they were written.

Only 3 percent of all books published in the United States are translated from other languages, and only 29 percent of those are by women authors. Rochester is home to several projects aimed at addressing this.

This fifth collection of poetry from the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English had its roots in a poem he wrote called “Pastoral,” which would set the collection’s tone of “feeling or spiritual development.”

Adam Parkes ’93 (PhD) explores the writing of Kazuo Ishiguro, recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, noting his fearless literary experimentation meshed with a simple austerity.

The annual prize was created in 1976 to recognize American women on the precipice of promising writing careers.

John Ashbery was memorialized as one of America’s premiere poets upon his passing earlier this month. English professor James Longenbach reflects on a long friendship with Ashbery and his impact on poetry and literature.

For more than 50 years, the Plutzik Reading Series has brought Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, and National Book Award winners to River Campus.

Pultizer Prize–winning poet Anthony Hecht was on the Rochester faculty for nearly two decades, arriving in 1967. Alumnus Jonathan Post ’76 (PhD) published Hecht’s correspondence in a book that sheds new light on his poetry.

Can poetry thrive in an age of instant communication? As April’s National Poetry Month begins, University’s poetry faculty and students have found that the answer is an emphatic “yes.” The pace of digital life has only quickened over the last ten years since Twitter was founded, but the slower process of reading and crafting poetry continues, robustly, at Rochester.

Chad Post, creator of Three Percent and a founder of the awards program as publisher of the University’s Open Letter Books, announced the winners May 4 during a ceremony in New York City.