All Readings from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on the First Thursday of the Month
Admission Free • Morrison Library in Doe Library • UC Berkeley
For directions to Doe Library please check the campus map. (lower right corner)
Series Kick-Off, 09.04.14 |
Frank O’Hara’s LUNCH POEMS Turns 50: An Anniversary Celebration, 10.02.14 |
Robin Robertson, 11.06.14 |
Gillian Conoley, 12.04.14
Joshua Weiner, 02.05.15 | Harmony Holiday, 03.05.15 |
Jane Hirshfield, 04.02.15 | Student Reading, 05.07.15
View
last year's series
The Library's Media
Resources Center also maintains an archive of this digital collection.
Lunch Poems Broadcast on UCTV
Click here for schedule
September 4, 2014
SERIES KICK-OFF
Hosted by Robert Hass and University Librarian Thomas C. Leonard, this event features distinguished faculty and staff from a wide range of disciplines introducing and reading a favorite poem. This year’s participants: La Dawn Duvall (Visitor & Parent Services), Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students Joseph Defraine Greenwell, Steven Finacom (Capital Projects), Alex Mastrangeli (English), Steve Mendoza (University Library), Carolyn Merchant (Environmental Science, Policy, & Management), Associate University Librarian Erik Mitchell, Shannon L. Monroe (University Library), and Kimmen Sjölander (Bioengineering)
October 2, 2014
FRANK O’HARA’s LUNCH POEMS TURNS 50: AN ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
In partnership with City Lights Books, who first published Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems 50 years ago, we present a special event featuring readings from a newly expanded edition that also includes communiqués by O’Hara pulled from the City Lights archive housed at the Bancroft Library. Participants include: Garrett Caples, C. S. Giscombe, Jayne Gregory, Robert Hass, Owen Hill, Elaine Katzenberger, Evan Klavon, giovanni singleton, Julianna Spahr, and Matthew Zapruder.
November 6, 2014
ROBIN ROBERTSON
Robin Robertson is from the Northeast coast of Scotland. He has published five collections of poetry—most recently Hill of Doors—and received a number of accolades, including the Petrarch Prize, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Cholmondeley Award, and all three Forward Prizes. He has also edited a collection of essays, Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame; translated two plays of Euripides, Medea and the Bacchae; and, in 2006, published The Deleted World, a selection of free-English versions of poems by Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish his selected poems, Sailing the Forest, in Fall 2014.
December 4, 2014
GILLIAN CONOLEY
Gillian Conoley was born in Austin Texas, where, on its rural outskirts, her father and mother owned and operated a radio station. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Peace (Omnidawn, 2014), The Plot Genie (2014), Profane Halo (2005), Lovers in the Used World (2001), and Tall Stranger (1991), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley’s work is widely anthologized, most recently in W. W. Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry. Her translations of Henri Michaux’s A Thousand Times Broken: Three Books are appearing in English for the first time and will be published by City Lights in Fall 2014. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University.
February 5, 2015
JOSHUA WEINER
Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013). He is also the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, and the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2014 fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. A professor of English at the University of Maryland, he lives with his family in Washington DC.
March 5, 2015
HARMONY HOLIDAY
Harmony Holiday is a poet, dancer, and archivist, mythscientist and the author of Negro League Baseball (Fence, 2011), Go Find Your Father/ A Famous Blues (Ricochet, 2014), and Hollywood Forever forthcoming from Fence in Spring 2015. She was the winner of the 2013 Ruth Lily Fellowship and she curates the Afrosonics archive, a collection of rare and out-of-print LPs and soundbites featuring poetry and poetics from throughout the African Diaspora, in both analog at Columbia University's music library and digitally as a Tumblr site. Her record label, Mythscience Records, devoted to making titles from the archive available to the public by way of reissues in both vinyl and digital formats is forthcoming starting with the reissue of Amiri Baraka's LP Black Spirits: Festival of New Black Poets in America. Holiday lives in New York and Los Angeles.
April 2, 2015
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Jane Hirshfield's eighth poetry book, The Beauty, appears from Knopf in early 2015, along with a new book of essays, Ten Windows. Previous books include Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011) and After (2006), named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Financial Times (UK). She has also written a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and edited and co-translated four books of work by world poets of the past. Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award, England's T. S. Eliot Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A frequent presenter at universities and literary festivals both in the US and abroad, in 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
May 7, 2015
STUDENT READING
One of the year’s most lively events, the student reading includes winners of the following prizes: Academy of American Poets, Cook, Rosenberg, and Yang, as well as students nominated by Berkeley’s creative writing faculty, Lunch Poems volunteers, and representatives from student publications.For more information or to be added to the Lunch Poems mailing list, please email: poems(at)library.berkeley.edu, or become our friend on Facebook.
Support for this series is provided by Dr. and Mrs. Tom Colby, the Library, The Morrison Library Fund, the dean’s office of the College of Letters and Sciences, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. These events are also partially supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.