Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts will present renowned poet, essayist, professor of classics and translator Anne Carson as its 2018–19 Sojka Visiting Poet. She will present her performance piece “A Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” with collaborator Robert Currie, on Tuesday, Nov. 13, at 7 p.m. in the Weis Center for Performing Arts. Book sales in the Weis Center Atrium will precede the reading.
Carson will also engage in a Q&A on Antigonick, her recent version of the Sophocles’ Antigone, with Bucknell English professor G.C. Waldrep and classics & ancient Mediterranean studies professor Stephanie Larson on Wednesday, Nov. 14 at 12 noon in the Elaine Langone Center Forum. Time will be allotted for audience questions. Please note that locations for these events have changed to reflect expected audience sizes. Both events are free and open to the public.
Carson’s Antigonick is the first-year common reading for Bucknell’s Class of 2022. “In the small world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry,” wrote Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Book Review, Carson “has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and admiration.” In addition to her many highly-regarded translations of classical writers such as Sophocles, Sappho, and Euripides, and her triptych rendering of An Oresteia (2009), she has published poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism, and verse novels that often cross genres. Carson’s recent collections include Nox (2010), Red Doc> (2013), and Float (2016). Her honors and awards are many, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. She has also received the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.
The Sandra and Gary Sojka Visiting Poet Series was established in 1995 through the generosity of Gary Sojka, who served as president of Bucknell University from 1985-1995, and his wife, Sandra.
All Stadler Center Writers Series events are free and open to the public. For more information on the series and programs of the Stadler Center, please contact stadlercenter@bucknell.edu, or call 570-577-1853.