Tracy K. Smith, Feb. 17, 2018, Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series, Thirteenth Season, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, Emory University Tracy K. Smith, 22nd US poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, gives a reading of her poems, as part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, “Ordinary Light,” and three books of poetry. Her collection “Life on Mars” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as...

Tracy K. Smith, Feb. 17, 2018, Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series, Thirteenth Season, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, Emory University Tracy K. Smith, 22nd US poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, gives a reading of her poems, as part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, “Ordinary Light,” and three books of poetry. Her collection “Life on Mars” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as...

Beat poet, editor, performer, activist, artist, and educator Anne Waldman gives a poetry reading, the first in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series' 2017–2018 season. Waldman's visit is also part of the opening celebrations for the exhibition at the Woodruff Library's Schatten Gallery, The Dream Machine: The Beat Generation & the Counterculture, 1940–1975. A Beat writer and the co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Waldman brings the spirit of the...

Beat poet, editor, performer, activist, artist, and educator Anne Waldman gives a poetry reading, the first in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series' 2017–2018 season. Waldman's visit is also part of the opening celebrations for the exhibition at the Woodruff Library's Schatten Gallery, The Dream Machine: The Beat Generation & the Counterculture, 1940–1975. A Beat writer and the co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Waldman brings the spirit of the...

Juan Felipe Herrera is the current (2015-present) and first Hispanic U.S. Poet Laureate. The author of poetry, short stories, young adult novels, and children’s literature, Herrera was awarded the National Book Critic’s Award in 2009. Herrera was born in 1948 in Fowler, California, as a son of migrant farmers, and grew up in the southern agricultural communities of the state. He graduated from San Diego High School in 1967 and earned a BA in social anthropology from UCLA, where he became...

The first event in its 2017 “Memorial Drive” series with a program about two dynamic women who decided what films would be shown or banned in Atlanta movie theaters for four decades. Matthew H. Bernstein, Goodrich C. White professor and chair of Emory’s Department of Film & Media Studies, discusses “Controlling Atlanta Screens: Movie Censorship from the 1920s to the 1960s.” The event leads off the 2017 “Memorial Drive” series, a collaboration between ArtsATL.com and Emory’s Rose Library...

Juan Felipe Herrera is the current (2015-present) and first Hispanic U.S. Poet Laureate. The author of poetry, short stories, young adult novels, and children’s literature, Herrera was awarded the National Book Critic’s Award in 2009. Herrera was born in 1948 in Fowler, California, as a son of migrant farmers, and grew up in the southern agricultural communities of the state. He graduated from San Diego High School in 1967 and earned a BA in social anthropology from UCLA, where he became...

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove reads at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts on the Emory University campus Feb. 28, 2016. This was Dove’s second reading (her first was in 2007) in the acclaimed Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series, now in its 11th season. Since its debut in 2005, the series has brought a wide range of acclaimed contemporary poets to Emory’s campus, including Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Natasha Trethewey,...

Charles Wright, the 2014-2015 U.S. Poet Laureate, is one of the most important American poets writing today. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, he is the author of over 20 books of poetry. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2014, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Here on October 1, 2015, Charles Wright reads at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts on the Emory University Campus for...

The award-winning poet Carol Ann Duffy gave a poetry readying at Emory University on February 21, 2015. Duffy is the first woman and first openly gay poet to be named Britain’s Poet Laureate and a crucial figure in world poetry today. She is an award-winning Scottish poet who writes with power, beauty, humor and grace about love, death, and women’s lives. Duffy’s literary papers are housed at the Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library at Emory. MARBL acquired Duffy’s archives in 1999,...

Elizabeth Alexander is the eighth poet in the Raymond Danowski Reading Library Series and read in 2009. Look for her entire album on iTunes U. Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of poems, including The Venus Hottentot, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She is also a scholar of African American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior....

Natasha Trethewey was the twenty-first poet of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2012. Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She is the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work (2000); Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize—and, most recently, Thrall, (2012). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf...

Sonia Sanchez was the seventh poet to read in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2007. Sanchez has won the American Book Award and the Robert Frost Medal, and held a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Influenced by jazz, the blues and the oral tradition, Sanchez’s poetry readings and performances have inspired generations of poets and audiences alike. A founder of the Black Arts Movement, Sanchez is the author of more than 16 books. Does Your House Have Lions? was...

Galway Kinell was the sixth poet to read in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2007. American poet Galway Kinnell's writing career spans more than five decades. In 1983 he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Selected Poems (1982). His other volumes of poetry include: The New Selected Poems (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Mortal Acts, Mortal Words...

Natasha Trethewey was the fourth poet to read in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2006. Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi; her first poetry collection, Domestic Work won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, selected by Rita Dove, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her most recent collection, Native Guard, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She is currently the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry in Emory’s...

Kevin Young was the first poet of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2005. Kevin Young is the author of six collections of poetry and the editor of four others. His first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton and won the Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. His third book, Jelly Roll, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Paterson Poetry Prize; his most recent book, Dear Darkness, was featured...

Simon Armitage was the second poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2005. Born in West Yorkshire, England, Simon Armitage has a degree in social work and worked as a probation officer in Manchester, England in the 1980s. Armitage is known for his distinctly northern British vernacular and dry wit; in Contemporary Poets, Brian Macaskill notes that Armitage's poetry brings to mind "Philip Larkin's late-career use of vernacular, slang locutions, and telling...

Sharon Olds was the twenty-fifth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2014. Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in...

Paul Muldoon was the twenty-fourth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2014. Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of...

Lucille Clifton was the third poet to read in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2006. At 16, Lucille Clifton entered college early, matriculating as a drama major at Howard University. In 1969, poet Robert Hayden entered her poems into competition for the YW-YMHA Poetry Center Discovery Award; she won the award and with it the publication of her first volume of poems, Good Times. Clifton served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1982, and in 2000 she won...

Don Paterson was the twentieth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2012. Don Paterson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Rain (Faber, 2009; FSG, 2010). He has published two books of aphorism and a compendium, Best Thought, Worst Thought (Graywolf, 2008). He has also edited a number of anthologies. His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber...

Linda Gregerson was the seventeenth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2012. A 2007 National Book Award finalist and recent Guggenheim Fellow, Linda Gergerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. She is the author of five books of poetry—most recently The Selvage (2012)—two books of criticism, and the...

Billy Collins was the eighteenth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2012. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. The author of eight collections, most recently Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was the inaugural recipient of...

D.A. Powell was the seventeenth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2011. Born in Albany, Georgia, D.A. Powell is the author of four poetry collections: Tea (1998); Lunch (2000); Cocktails (2004); and Chronic (2009), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, he has received a Pushcart Prize and the California Book Award. His new collection, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys will be...