Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia is hosting a reading by poet David Wojahn on March 7 at 6 p.m. at Ciné, located at 235 West Hancock Ave. As part of the English department’s Helen Spencer Lanier Lecture Series, the event is free and open to the public.
Wojahn is the author of six collections of poetry, five published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Spirit Cabinet (2002), The Falling Hour (1997), Late Empire (1994), Mystery Train (1990) and Glassworks (1987, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award). Icehouse Lights (1982, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award) was published by Yale University Press.
In addition to his poetry books, Wojahn is the author of Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, and editor of The Only World (Harper Perennial, 1995), a posthumous collection of his wife Lynda Hull’s poetry. He, along with Jack Myers, is the editor of A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University, 1991).
According to poet Tom Sleigh, Wojahn’s poems “meld the political and personal in a way that is unparalleled by any living American poet.” He has a unique ability to, according to poet Jean Valentine, follow “tragedy to its grave depths, with dignity and unsparingness, and egolessness.” Poet Richard Hugo wrote, “David Wojahn’s poems concern themselves with emotive basics: leaving home, watching those we love age and die, the inescapable drone of our mortality. Yet as poems, they are far from usual. They help us welcome inside, again and again, the most personal of feelings.”
A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois Arts Council and the Indiana Arts Commission, Wojahn’s awards include the William Carlos Williams Award and the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the George Kent Prize from Poetry magazine and three Pushcart prizes. His poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Georgia Review and TriQuarterly.
Wojahn is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty member of the master’s of fine arts in writing program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts.
For more information on the Helen Spencer Lanier Lecture Series in the UGA department of English, see http://www.english.uga.edu/newsite/cwp/events.html.
