{"id":237532,"date":"2017-04-20T08:28:26","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T12:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=237532"},"modified":"2026-09-11T13:58:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T17:58:43","slug":"literary-lights-237532","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/literary-lights-237532\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary lights: URochester\u2019s Plutzik Reading Series over the decades"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>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.<\/h2>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.knightlab.com\/libs\/timeline3\/latest\/embed\/index.html?source=13fPaq4JV-ZA9JCTxGMM0lLvFSpTyl0qZtt16T6bCw2M&amp;font=Default&amp;lang=en&amp;initial_zoom=2&amp;height=650\" width=\"100%\" height=\"650\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The roster reads like a Who\u2019s Who of modern literature: James Baldwin, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Michael Ondaatje, Adrienne Rich, Salman Rushdie, Allen Ginsberg, Rita Dove, J. M. Coetzee, W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and John Updike, to name a few.<\/p>\n<p>Since 1962, more than 300 poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers have been guests of the <a href=\"https:\/\/sas.rochester.edu\/eng\/\">English department<\/a>\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sas.rochester.edu\/eng\/plutzik\/\">Plutzik Reading Series<\/a>, sharing their work with students, faculty, and area community members in one of the nation\u2019s longest-running collegiate reading\u00a0programs.<\/p>\n<p>Plutzik, who joined the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\">University of Rochester<\/a> English faculty in 1945, made it his mission to ensure that students would be able to appreciate poetry not only on the page, but also as a performative act, in which listeners would experience the excitement of an impassioned author at a podium. Although Plutzik started small\u2014reading his own poetry to students in the Welles-Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library\u2014his insistence on poetry as an experience launched a series that has featured the foremost names in literature, including Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning writers, and National Book Award winners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":237962,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13092],"tags":[20542,2276,13992],"class_list":["post-237532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-arts","tag-department-of-english","tag-literature","tag-rochester-review"],"acf":{"external":"","hide_featured_image":false,"related":"show_related","style":"","content_modules":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Literary lights: URochester\u2019s Plutzik Reading Series over the decades<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Plutzik Reading Series has brought Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, and National Book Award winners to URochester.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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