Award Winning Poet to Give Lecture as Part of Holy Cross Visiting Writers Series

WORCESTER, Mass. – Gerald Stern, poet and author, will give a reading on Thursday, Sept. 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture is part of the College’s Visiting Writers Lecture Series. Sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, it is free and open to the public.

Stern, born in Pittsburgh, Penn, in 1925, received his B.A. at the University of Pittsburgh and his M.A. at Columbia University. His recent books of poetry include Everything Is Burning (Norton, 2005); American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); and Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize.  His other books include Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990); Two Long Poems (1990); Lovesick (1987); Paradise Poems (1984); The Red Coal (1981), which received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; Lucky Life, the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Rejoicings (1973).

Stern has received numerous awards including the Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005, Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. Stern was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. He resides in Lambertville, N.J.