Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Robert Hass at SNC Sept 25
Posted on August 27, 2009
Filed Under North Tahoe Events
Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, along with Brenda Hillman, will read selections of their work and sign books at Sierra Nevada College.
The event will take place in the campus’s Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences, room 139, on Friday, September 25 from 7-9pm. This event is free and open to the public.
Robert Hass is a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. In his tenure as a two-term United States poet laureate (1995-1997), Hass spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra “imagination makes communities.” For Hass, everything is connected—when he works to heighten literacy, he is also working to promote awareness about the environment. In 2008, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Time and Materials. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Hass significantly broadened the role of poet laureate to include not only his love for poetry but also his concern for literacy and his passion for environmentalism.” His awards include two MacArthur Genius Fellowships, two National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, and the Yale Younger Poets Award. Currently a professor at UC Berkeley, his books include Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as translations and critical works including Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry and The Essential Haiku. Hass is the founder of the River of Words program, an organization that focuses on issues of literacy and ecology.
Also an activist, environmentalist and acclaimed poet, Brenda Hillman is the author of eight books of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Cascadia, Loose Sugar, and Pieces of Air in the Epic, as well as her most recent work, Practical Water (2009). She co-edited the collection The Grand Permission: New Writing on Poetics and Motherhood. She is currently a professor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. Hillman has been a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors.
For more information on the book reading and signing, please contact English Program Chair June Saraceno at 775.881.7514.
