(Kansas University, Lawrence, KS) Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Lyn Hejinian will visit the University of Kansas on March 6, 2008. At 4:00 p.m., she will read from her work in the Spencer Museum of Art, on the KU campus. At 7:30 p.m., at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union, she will deliver the KU English Department’s prestigious John F. Eberhardt Lecture. The lecture, entitled “Outside Poetry,” will deal with literary works that combine or undercut traditional genres.
Hejinian, a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, has produced dozens of books in a wide variety of genres. She edited The Best American Poetry 2004, and is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking experimental autobiography, My Life, and for the widely influential essay “The Rejection of Closure.” One of Hejinian’s recent projects is The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, written with nine other authors. In the fall of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth Fellow of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2006, a Chancellor of the Academy. She has received numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.
“Lyn Hejinian is one of the most innovative and exciting American writers of the last several decades. She has written in every genre I can think of and even invented some I can’t,” says KU professor Joseph Harrington, whose specialty is American poetry since 1900. “Her work has had an enormous influence on generations of new writers and will be read and taught for years to come.”
More information on Lyn Hejinian can be found at the Electronic Poetry Center web site, at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hejinian/ and the Academy of American Poets: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/396. For more information on the event, contact William J. Harris at wjh8 at ku dot edu.
