Marie Gauthier

Exciting news!

This Sunday, July 6th, at 7:00pm, the Collected Poets Series is sponsoring a special reading with the poet Galway Kinnell. He will read from his work at Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge Street, Shelburne Falls, MA.

Galway Kinnell has received the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Frost Medal, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In the nomination for the 2003 National Book Award, the judges called Kinnell “America’s preeminent visionary” whose work “greets each new age with rapture and abundance [and] sets him at the table with his mentors: Rilke, Whitman, Frost.”

Kinnell’s volumes of poetry include Strong Is Your Hold; Imperfect Thirst; When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, Selected Poems; The Past; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World: Poems 1946-64; The Book of Nightmares; Body Rags; Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock; What a Kingdom It Was; and many others. He is the editor of The Essential Whitman. He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefoy, Yvan Goll, and François Villon, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

He is renowned as an especially sensuous poet and moving reader. By giving public readings since 1960, Kinnell has been influential in making the poetry reading a part of our cultural life. Galway Kinnell has served as the State Poet of Vermont, and was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University for 25 years. He is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in Vermont.

I’ve heard Galway read twice before, and he is simply tremendous, and so generous with his time. This is sure to be a standing-room-only event, so get there early!