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Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published four collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume '' Life on Mars.'' Her memoir, '' Ordinary Light'', was published in 2015. In April 2018, she was nominated for a second term as United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Early life Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she was raised in Fairfield, California, in a family with "deep roots" in Alabama. Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her book ''Life on Mars'' pays homage to her father's life and work. Smith became interested in writing and poetry early, reading Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in elementary school; Dickinson's poems, in particular, struck Smith as working like "magic," she wrote in her memoir ''Ordinary Light'', with the rhyme and mete ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Library Of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains a conservation center in Culpeper, Virginia. The library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 470 languages." Congress moved to Washington, D.C., in 1800 after holding sessions for eleven years in the temporary national capitals in New York City and Philadelphia. In both cities, members of the U.S. Congress had access to the sizable colle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fairfield, California
Fairfield is a city in and the county seat of Solano County, California, in the North Bay sub-region of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is generally considered the midpoint between the cities of San Francisco and Sacramento, approximately from the city center of each city, approximately from the city center of Oakland, less than from Napa Valley, from the Carquinez Bridge, and from the Benicia Bridge. Fairfield was founded in 1856 by clippership captain Robert H. Waterman, and named after his former hometown of Fairfield, Connecticut. It is the home of Travis Air Force Base and the headquarters of Jelly Belly. With a population of 119,881 at the 2020 census, it is slightly smaller in population than Vallejo. Other nearby cities include Suisun City, Vacaville, Rio Vista, Benicia, and Napa. Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which, of it is land and of it is water. The total area is 5.65% water. The c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dark Room Collective
The Dark Room Collective was an influential African-American poetry collective. Established in 1988, the collective hosted a reading series that featured leading figures in Black literature. Founding and activities After attending the funeral of literary icon James Baldwin in 1987, poets Sharan Strange and Thomas Sayers Ellis, then Harvard undergraduates, with poet-composer Janice Lowe, a Berklee College of Music student, co-founded the Dark Room Reading Series in 1988. The series was named for a project called ''The Dark Room: A Collection of Black Writing'', a library containing the works of black authors which was hosted in a former darkroom on the third floor of their Victorian house at 31 Inman Street in Cambridge. The Dark Room Collective hosted a writing workshop and gatherings of black artists and writers at the house. They were visited by African-American writers including Alice Walker, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Derek Walcott, Samuel R. Delany, poet Essex Hemphi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henri Cole
Henri Cole (born 1956) is an American poet, who has published many collections of poetry and a memoir. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic. Biography Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to an American father and French-Armenian mother, and raised in Virginia, United States. His father, a North Carolinian, enlisted in the service after graduating from high school and, while stationed in Marseilles, met Cole's mother, who worked at the PX. Together they lived in Japan, Germany, Illinois, California, Nevada, Missouri and Virginia, where Cole attended public schools and the College of William and Mary. He has published ten collections of poetry in English. From 1982 until 1988 he was executive director of The Academy of American Poets. Since that time he has held many teaching positions and been artist-in-residence at various institutions, including Brandeis University, Columbia University, Davidson College, Harvard University, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lucie Brock-Broido
Lucie Brock-Broido (May 22, 1956 – March 6, 2018) was an American author of four collections of poetry. Biography She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she was Director of Poetry in the Writing Division at Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City. Her long narrative poem, ''Jessica from the Well'', tells the story of 18-month-old Jessica McClure, who was trapped in a well in Texas, from McClure's point of view, describing her as having a basic understanding of the physical and mythic elements of her situation. It has been reprinted numerous times. Brock-Broido died on March 6, 2018, aged 61, from cancer at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Awards and honors * She received many honors, including the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helen Vendler
Helen Hennessy Vendler (born April 30, 1933) is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University. Life and career Helen Hennessy Vendler was born on April 30, 1933, in Boston, Massachusetts, to George Hennessy and Helen Hennessy. She was the second of three children. Her parents encouraged her to read poems as a child. Vendler's father taught Spanish, French, and italian at a high school, while her mother had taught in a primary school before marriage. Vendler attended Emmanuel College over the Boston Girls' Latin School and Radcliffe College because her parents would not let her enroll in "secular education". She received an A. B. from Emmanuel. Vendler was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, attending the Université catholique de Louvain from 1954 to 1955, for mathematics. But while traveling to the university, she decided that she would rather study English than math and the Fulbright commission allowed her to switch her focus to lit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020 she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. Early life Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, to Ray Dove, one of the first African-American chemists to work ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa (born James William Brown; April 29, 1941) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for ''Neon Vernacular'' and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to poetry. His subject matter ranges from the black experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights era and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War. Life and career According to public records, Komunyakaa was born in 1947 and given the name James William Brown. (His former wife said in her memoir that he was born in 1941.) He was the eldest of five children of James William Brown, a carpenter, and his wife. He grew up in the small town of Bogalusa, Louisiana. As an adult, he reclaimed the name ''Komunyakaa'', said to be his grandfa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, ''The North Ship'', was published in 1945, followed by two novels, ''Jill'' (1946) and ''A Girl in Winter'' (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, '' The Less Deceived'', followed by ''The Whitsun Weddings'' (1964) and ''High Windows'' (1974). He contributed to ''The Daily Telegraph'' as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in ''All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71'' (1985), and edited '' The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse'' (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman. After graduating from Oxford University in 1943 with a first in English Language and Literature, Larkin became a librarian. It was during the thirty ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.Obituary: Heaney ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’ ''Irish Times,'' 30 August 2013.Seamus Heaney obituary ''The Guardian,'' 30 August 2013. Among his best-known works is '''' (1966), his first major published volume. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century". Early life Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to William Thomas and Gertrude May (Bulmer) Bishop. After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop's mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916. (Bishop would later write about the time of her mother's struggles in her short story "In the Village".) [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include '' The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' (1876) and its sequel, '' Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1884), the latter of which has often been called the " Great American Novel". Twain also wrote '' A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' (1889) and '' Pudd'nhead Wilson'' (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for ''Tom Sawyer'' and ''Huckleberry Finn''. He served an apprenticeship with a printer and then worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother Orion Clemens. He later became a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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