KU News Release

Acclaimed poet Lyn Hejinian to read, lecture March 6 at KU

LAWRENCE — Award-winning poet, essayist and translator Lyn Hejinian will visit the University of Kansas on Thursday, March 6, for two presentations.

At 4 p.m., she will read from her work in the Spencer Museum of Art. At 7:30 p.m., she will deliver the Department of English’s John F. Eberhardt Lecture at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The lecture, titled “Outside Poetry,” will deal with literary works that combine or undercut traditional genres.

Hejinian, professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley, has produced dozens of books in a wide variety of genres. She edited “The Best American Poetry 2004” and is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking experimental autobiography “My Life” and for the widely influential essay “The Rejection of Closure.” In the fall of 2000, she was elected the 66th fellow of the Academy of American Poets and in 2006, a chancellor of the academy. She has received numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.

“Lyn Hejinian is one of the most innovative and exciting American poets of the last several decades,” said Joseph Harrington, associate professor of English whose specialty is American poetry since 1900. “But she has written in every genre I can think of and even invented some I can’t. Her work has had an enormous influence on generations of new writers and will be read and taught for years to come.”

More information on Hejinian can be found at the Electronic Poetry Center Web site and the Academy of American Poets Web site.

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