IN CELEBRATION OF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, BARD'S JOHN ASHBERY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS ROBERT KELLY AND MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE ON FRIDAY, APRIL 27
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY-The John Ashbery Poetry Series at Bard College continues with readings by Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of English at Bard, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, on Friday, April 27, at 3:30 p.m. The reading, presented by The Bard Center, is free and open to the public and will be held in Room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building.
Robert Kelly has taught at Bard since 1961; he founded the writing program in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 1980, and directed it for a dozen years. He has received a number of grants and awards, including a prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and an honorary doctor of letters degree from the State University of New York. He is the author of more than 50 books of poetry (including Red Actions, a selection of poems from 1960-1993), several novels, and four collections of shorter fiction. His most recent books are Mont Blanc (a writing through of Shelley's poem), The Time of Voice, Runes, and The Garden of Distances, the last a collaboration with Tyrolean painter Brigitte Mahlknecht. Lapis, poems 1997-2000, will be published next winter. Kelly is working on a new novel and a collection of critical and theoretical essays, as well as on Orion: Opening the Seals, a long poem whose opening section can be found in the latest issue of Conjunctions, of which he is a contributing editor.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing in 1947 and grew up in Massachusetts. Her books include The Heat Bird, Empathy, Sphericity, Endocrinology, Four Year Old Girl, and the forthcoming Nest. Her collaborations include artist books with Richard Tuttle and Kiki Smith, and theatre works with Frank Chin, Blondell Cummings, Tan Dun, Shi Zhen Chen, and Alvin Lucier. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two American Book Awards, and book awards from the Asian-American Writers Workshop and the Western States Art Foundation. She has been a contributing editor of Conjunctions since 1978, and has taught at Brown University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. A resident of rural New Mexico for 25 years, she now also lives in New York City with artist Richard Tuttle and their daughter.
Concluding the spring 2001 poetry series will be a reading by Kristin Prevallet and Eleni Sikelianos on Friday, May 4, at 3:30 p.m. in Room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building. For further information, call The Bard Center at 845-758-7425.
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