Renowned Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun will join award-winning American poet Brian Henry for a reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 3.
The event, sponsored by the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences as part of its spring Reading Series, is free and open to the public and takes place in Duncker Hall, Room 201, Hurst Lounge.
Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Salamun earned a master’s degree from the University of Ljubljana in 1965. He studied at the University of Iowa in 1972 and has lived periodically in the United States ever since.
Salamun has published more than 30 books of poetry, including nine collections in English, most recently “The Book for My Brother” and “Row” (both 2006). Other volumes include “Poker” (2003), a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize, and “The Four Questions of Melancholy” (1997), nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His next volume, “Woods and Chalices,” is forthcoming in 2008.
Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, has called Salamun “one of Europe’s great philosophical wonders.” His numerous honors include the Preseren Prize, the highest Slovenian award for artistic achievement, as well as the Jenko Prize, a Pushcart Prize and the Mladost Prize. In 1996, he became cultural attache to the Slovenian embassy in New York.
Henry, an associate professor of English at the University of Richmond, has published five collections of poetry, including “Astronaut” (2000), “American Incident” (2002), “Quarantine” (2006), “The Stripping Point” (2007) and “In the Unlikely Event of a Water” (2007).
Henry won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for “Quarentine.” Other honors include the Poetry Society’s George Bogin Memorial Award, the Carol Weinstein Poetry Prize and a Forward Prize nomination for “Astronaut.”
For more information, call 935-7130 or e-mail dschuman@wustl.edu.