Mixed Media

Pulitzer-prize winning poet will give free reading at Ithaca College

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz will give a free public reading at Ithaca College on Tuesday, Sept. 15. His presentation, which is sponsored by the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series in the Department of Writing, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall.

Schultz is the founder and director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He has been called by Norman Mailer “a hell of a poet, one of the very best of his generation.” Despite its name, Schultz’s collection of poems titled “Failure” was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize “for distinguished volume of original verse.”

Other honors for Schultz’s poetry collections include the Lamont Poetry Selection award from the Academy of American Poets for “Deep Within the Ravine” and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “Like Wings.”

Schultz has been awarded Fulbright, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Levinson Prize from “Poetry” magazine. His poems have been published in the “The New Yorker,” “Partisan Review,” “Paris Review” and “New Republic,” among other magazines.

Also giving readings in the Distinguished Visiting Writers series this fall will be National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter on Tuesday, Oct. 6, and essayist Jo Ann Beard on Wednesday, Oct. 28.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet at Ithaca College

The Ithaca College Department of Writing and School of Humanities and Sciences will welcome Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa to campus as part of the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series. He will read from his work on Tuesday, March 25, at 7:30 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Komunyakaa is the author of 12 books of poetry, including “Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems,” for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. He has also been honored with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, while his “Thieves of Paradise” and “Talking Dirty to the Gods” were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The subject matter of Komunyakaa’s writing ranges from the African-American experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights movement and his experiences doing a tour of duty in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

Komunyakaa served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. He has taught at the University of New Orleans, Indiana University and Princeton University. He is currently professor and distinguished senior poet at New York University.

Books by Komunyakaa will be for sale at the reading, which will be followed by a book signing opportunity. For more information, visit the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series website, or contact Jack Wang, assistant professor of writing, at (607) 274-3493 or wang@ithaca.edu.