ShelfLife@Texas

On January 26, 2012,  UT’s Michener Center for Writers will host a visit by one of America’s premier poets, Mark Strand.  In a career spanning six decades, Strand has been recognized with the highest honors the poetry world has to bestow:  he was U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990-91, served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has won such distinguished awards as a MacArthur Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bobbit Prize, and in 2009, the…

On Friday, April 8, poets from across the country will read at Austin Museum of Art downtown in a benefit honoring The University of Texas at Austin’s  Livingston Endowed Chair in Poetry Dean Young, beloved poet and teacher who faces a heart transplant.

Nationally acclaimed poets Tony Hoagland, Thomas Lux, Dobby Gibson, Barbara Ras, Stuart Dischell, David Rivard and Joe Di Prisco are volunteering their time to fly in for the free event and will read along with a raft of local poets,…

Her poems are like no one else’s—hard and luminous, weird in the sense of making a thing strange that we at last might see it. —AMERICAN POET

Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, who is a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers this spring, will give a reading of her work at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, April 1, in the Avaya Auditorium, ACE 2.302, on campus at 24th and Speedway.

The author of three acclaimed volumes, Kelly has won some of the most…

C.D. Wright is a poet who defies labels. Over a distinguished career and  twelve published volumes of poetry, prose, and a slippery mix of the two, she has continually reinvented herself.

Variously described as narrative, experimental, Southern, deeply personal, and fiercely political, Wright credits her roots in the Arkansas Ozarks for her resistance to joining a single, identifying “ism” of the poetry world—she was born to a stubborn independence.  And the breadth of her range is as great as the remove between…