February 6, 2003 Jane Hirshfield and Glyn Maxwell Poetry Readings at the Library of Congress Feb. 20

Press Contact: Sheryl Cannady (202) 707-6456, scannady@loc.gov
Public Contact: (202) 707-5394

The Library of Congress will host poetry readings by award-winning poets Jane Hirshfield and Glyn Maxwell at 6:45 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 20, in the Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Ave., S.E. in Washington, D.C. The program is presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. Tickets are not required.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Given Sugar, Given Salt," finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; "The Lives of the Heart" (1997); and "Of Gravity & Angels" (1988). A winner of The Poetry Center Book Award, she also has written a book of essays on poetry, "Nine Gates" (1997), and edited and co- translated two poetry anthologies: "The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan" and "Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women."

Hirshfield's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University's Translation Center Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, and many other publications.

Born in Hertfordshire, England in 1962, Glyn Maxwell studied English at Oxford University and received a scholarship to Boston University where he studied poetry and drama with Nobel-Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott. Maxwell currently is teaching in the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York City and served as a visiting writer at Amherst College. Appointed poetry editor at The New Republic in 2001, Maxwell's most recent book of poetry, "The Nerve," was published in 2002.

His first collection of poems, "Tale of the Mayor's Son," was published in 1990 and his first novel, "Blue Burneau" (1994), was a finalist for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Among Maxwell's other works are "Out of the Rain" (1992), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; "Rest for the Wicked" (1995), a finalist for both the Whitbread and the T. S. Eliot awards; and "The Breakage" (1998), a finalist for the Forward Poetry Prize Best Collection Award. In 1997, he was awarded the E.M. Forster Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Maxwell has also written several verse plays, including "Gnyss the Magnificent" (1993), which collects three of his plays into one volume. His verse novel, "Time's Fool" (2001), retells the Flying Dutchman legend.

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PR 03-021
2003-02-06
ISSN 0731-3527