John Hollander, Poet Laureate of Connecticut; Penelope Pelizzon; Director, Creative Writing Program, UConn; and Nancy Kuhl, Associate Curator, Beinecke Library, Yale.

On Monday, April 9th, 2007, on the campus of Central Connecticut State University, in Founder's Hall from 4:00 - 6:00 pm, three acclaimed poets share the stage. Director of the Creative Writing Program at UConn, Penelope Pelizzon and Associate Curator at the Beinecke Library at Yale, Nancy Kuhl will be followed by the recent named Poet Laureate of the state of Connecticut John Hollander. This event is free and open to the public.

 

	V. Penelope Pelizzon
	V. Penelope Pelizzon's first poetry collection, Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000) won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America¹s 2001 Norma Farber First Book Award. Other honors include a Discovery/The Nation Award, The Kenneth Rexroth Translation Award (for Umberto Saba¹s poems from Italian), and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. Her new poems and essays have appeared recently in Poetry, The Hudson Review, 32 Poems, The Kenyon Review, Field, the New England Review, and Fourth Genre.

	Nancy Kuhl
	Nancy Kuhl is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Wife of the Left Hand (Shearsman Books, 2007). Her chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher, and Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where she curates the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series. She is the author of two exhibition catalogs,
Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts and Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women, which are distributed by the University Press of New England.

	John Hollander
	John Hollander was born in New York City on October 28, 1929. He attended Columbia and Indiana Universities and was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Picture Window (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), Figurehead: And Other Poems (1999), Tesserae (1993), Selected Poetry (1993), Harp Lake (1988), Powers of Thirteen (1983), Spectral Emanations (1978), Types of Shape (1969), and A Crackling of Thorns (1958), which was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
His seven books of criticism include: The Work of Poetry (1997), Melodious Guile (1988), The Figure of Echo (1981), Rhyme's Reason (1981), Vision and Resonance (1975), Images of Voice (1970), and The Untuning of the Sky (1961). He has edited numerous books, among them Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize (The Academy of American Poets and Books & Co./Turtle Point Press, 1996); The Gazer's Spirit (1995); Poems Bewitched and Haunted (2005); Animal Poems (1994); The Library of America's two-volume anthology Nineteenth Century American Poetry (1993); The Essential Rossetti (1990); Poems of Our Moment (1968); Selected Poems of Ben Jonson (1961); and The Wind and the Rain: An Anthology of Poems for Young People (with Harold Bloom, 1961). He was co-editor of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973) and Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls (with Anthony Hecht, 1967). He has also written books for children and has collaborated on operatic and lyric works with such composers as Milton Babbitt, George Perle, and Hugo Weisgall. About his early work, the critic Harold Bloom said, "Hollander's expressive range and direct emotional power attain triumphant expression. I am moved to claim for these poems a vital place in that new Expressionistic mode that begins to sound like the poetry of the Seventies that matters, and that will survive us." Hollander's many honors include the Bollingen Prize, the Levinson Prize, and the MLA Shaughnessy Medal, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the current poet laureate of Connecticut, he has taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Yale, where is currently the Sterling Professor emeritus of English.