Celebrated poet to speak for reading series

Poet Jean Valentine, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23.

The talk — part of The Writing Program’s Fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public.

Valentine

The lecture takes place in Dunker Hall, Room 201, Hurst Lounge. A reception and book signing will follow.

Valentine is the State Poet of New York. She was born in Chicago and earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College but has lived most of her life in New York City.

In 1965, she won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, “Dream Barker.” In 2004, her collection “Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003” won a National Book Award for Poetry.

Her most recent book is “Little Boat” (2007). In all, Valentine has authored 11 volumes of poetry.

Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts and The New York Foundation for the Arts.

She also has won the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, among many others.

For more information, call 935-7130 or e-mail David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.