Writer, publisher and acclaimed poet C. D. Wright — “one of America’s oddest, best, and most appealing poets” according to Publisher’s Weekly — will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, as part of the Fall Reading Series 2003.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by The Writing Program and the Department of English, both in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University, and takes place in Hurst Lounge, located in Room 201, Duncker Hall. A book-signing and reception will immediately follow the reading, with copies of Wright’s books available for purchase. Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt Drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.
Wright is the author of 10 volumes of poetry, most recently Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2002), Deepstep Come Shining (Copper Canyon, 1998) and Tremble (Ecco, 1996). She is a winner of the Poetry Center Book Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bunting Institute.
Of Wright’s work, Mary Jo Bang, associate professor of English at Washington University, said that “C. D. Wright writes poems that make us examine those elusive quotidian moments that continually pass in front of our distracted, and almost sightless, eyes. She shows us how much we miss — like what happens to beet juice when it’s drunk from a glass, how it ‘render(s) the light liquid.’ She ends the poem Key Episodes from an Earthly Life with a closing couplet, ‘I came to talk you into physical splendor / I do not wish to speak to your machine’.
“Wright’s poems both take us, and talk us, into the physical splendor we would see if only we were as attentive as those small robotic machines that we so often ask to stand in for us,” Bang concluded.
C. D. Wright teaches at the graduate program in creative writing at Brown University. With her husband, the poet Forest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publications.