News and Information
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

Release date: March 4 1999
Contact:Deb Hammacher, Assistant Director

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING POET TO GIVE READING/BOOKSIGNING AT EMORY

The writer called "one of the most important living poets" by The New Yorker will give a reading at 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, March 17 at Emory University. Jorie Graham, recipient of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collection The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, will read from her works as part of Emory's Creative Writing Program writers series. Her reading will be followed by a reception and booksigning. Activities will take place in 205 White Hall, 480 Kilgo Circle, on the Emory campus. The reading is free and open to the public.

Graham is the author of many poetry collections, including The Errancy (1997), Materialism (1993), Region of Unlikeness (1991), The End of Beauty (1987), Erosion (1983), and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980). She also has edited the anthologies Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her newest collection of poems, entitled Swamp, will be published this winter.

A member of the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Graham recently was appointed Boylston Professor at Harvard University and divides her time between Iowa and Massachusetts.

What the critics say about Jorie Graham

Provocative in its spirited mergings of the sacred and the skeptical, the celestial and the earthly, The Errancy confirms Graham's standing as "one of the most important living poets."

­­ Library Journal

"Few poets address the predicament of the postmodern soul as rigorously or as intelligently as Graham.... 'An icy thing, even in its fluency,' this masterful collection takes risks in naming 'the small hole inside I'm supposed to love' and coldly, bleakly and dazzlingly succeeds."

- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"For two decades now, Graham's poems have been exercising the major muscles in the throat of our language. If you haven't been listening, I'm telling you there's a new music out there, and this book,

The Errancy, is its finest performance."

- The Boston Book Review

"A recent profile of Graham in The New Yorker (July 1997) places her in the lineage of Eliot, Bishop, and Ashbery rather than William Carlos Williams or Robert Creeley, but it might be posited that her capacious talent now draws on all these examples: the bodiless virtuosity of formal mastery has met the flexibility and passion of the mind and eye at liberty. The Errancy is what might be called, among Quakers, a leading: Graham shows us a future direction in American poetry, and that future is a welcome place."

- Harvard Review

"Jorie Graham stands among a small group of poets (Dickinson, Hopkins, Moore) whose styles are so personal that the poems seem to have no author at all: they exist as self-made things. Each of her books has interrogated the one preceding it, and The Errancy feels like a culmination. It is her most challenging, most rewarding book... providing all the satisfactions we expect from poetry- aural beauty, emotional weight -along with an intellectual rigor we don't expect. No one but Jorie Graham could have written it."

- The Nation