READING: William Jay Smith

Tuesday 25 March
Lecture Room - 6pm

Poet, Cummington, Massachusetts and Resident in Literature, American Academy in Rome

William Jay Smith has been a major force in American letters for over half a century. He is the author of more that fifty books of poetry, children's verse, memoirs, and criticism. From 1968 to 1970 he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a post now called the Poet Laureate). Two of his twelve poetry collections were finalists for the National Book Award, and his translations have won awards from the French Academy, the Swedish Academy, and the Hungarian government. Since its publication in 1955, Laughing Time, his first book for children, has never been out of print and poems from it and from subsequent books appear regularly in anthologies and textbooks throughout the world.

Smith will read from his recent book of poems The World below the Window, a selection of sixty years, which contains work for children, and from The Cherokee Lottery, a sequence of poems about the removal of the Southern Indians, which critic Harold Bloom has called "his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable."