Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Fellowship, Boylston professorship. Jorie Graham has won most of the awards available to poets and has built a reputation as one of the most challenging and talented poets writing today.
On Friday, Nov. 2, she will be visiting the Portland campus’ Luther Bonney Auditorium to present her work.
Ken Rosen, a professor in the English Department and a poet himself, notes that Graham is at the forefront of American poetry and was a natural selection for this year’s guest poet.
He is referring to her extensive credentials, which include a number of coveted awards and professional positions. Graham is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, a title formerly held by Seamus Heaney, the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1997, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and she is the author of eight collections of poetry including The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which garnered her the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Although the event is scheduled at the awkward hour of 4 p.m. on a weekday, the English Department is pleased that Graham could make an appearance, says Rosen.
“She wasn’t able to come last year. This year we’d almost given up hope,” he says.
Graham comes to the University at the request of the English Department and through the aid of the Katherine O’Brien Bequest. The fund consists of a $400,000 donation to the University of Maine System from the estate of Katharine O’Brien, a Deering High School teacher. USM received $93,000 from this donation to bring noted poets to the University and to create a poetry collection in O’Brien’s name at the Glickman Library. Of that, $2,500 has been set aside for guest poets.