Poetry Reading: Robert Pinsky

Award-winning poet Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented three terms as United States Poet Laureate and founded The Favorite Poem Project, www.favoritepoem.org.  His poetry collections include Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) Gulf Music (2008), Jersey Rain (2000), The Want Bone (1990) and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996). As Louise Glück states, “Robert Pinsky is one of the few literary artists working in our language whose work is unquestionably major work.” His best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante (1994) was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor’s Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. His prose books include Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (2005) and The Sounds of Poetry (1998). Among his many awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, the Italian Premio Capri, the PEN-Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University where he has been named a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor.