Poet Brenda Shaughnessy to speak for Writing Program Reading Series March 5

Poet Brenda Shaughnessy will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 5, in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on Washington University’s Danforth Campus.

The talk, presented by the university’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, is free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow.

Shaughnessy

Shaughnessy is the author of “Human Dark with Sugar” (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and one of five finalists for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her earlier collection, “Interior with Sudden Joy” (1999), was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award.

“Sassy, tough-girl humor. . . . [Brenda] Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy,” noted the Harvard Review.

Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Yale Review, among other journals.

A frequent visiting writer and lecturer, Shaughnessy is also the poetry editor of Tin House magazine.

Born in Okinawa, Japan, and raised in Southern California, Shaughnessy received a bachelor of arts degree in literature and women’s studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University in New York.

She is lecturer in creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She also teaches at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate liberal arts division of The New School in New York City.

Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has received additional fellowships from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, the Greenwall Foundation and the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, artists’ communities in New Hampshire and New York, respectively.

For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or e-mail David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.