Legacy Conversation With Derek Walcott December 2, 2005

Friday, December 2, 2005
7 pm ?
The Lang Student Center
The New School University,
55 W. 13th Street, 2nd Floor
FREE

CONTACT: Carolyn Micklem / Dante Micheaux 212-941-5720

A Legacy Conversation with Derek Walcott

We invite you for an evening of poetry and conversation when Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, is interviewed by Elizabeth Alexander. It is the ninth in a series of historic occasions where distinguished poets of the African Diaspora read from their work, discuss ideas on poetics, and examine the interplay between their personal and professional lives and their work. Made possible through collaboration with the Creative Writing Department at the New School and funding from the Lila Acheson Wallace Theater Fund.

Derek Walcott was born in Saint Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930, and began writing poetry at the age of eighteen. He graduated from the University of the West Indies, and in 1957 was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the American theater. He is the founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, and his plays have been produced throughout the United States. His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen's Medal for Poetry. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Walcott teaches creative writing at Boston University every fall and lives the rest of the year in St. Lucia.

Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City and grew up in Washington, DC. Her collections of poetry include American Sublime, Antebellum Dream Book, The Venus Hottentot, and Body of Life. Among her honors are a Guggenheim, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago, and the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She currently teaches English and African American Studies at Yale University.