Louise Glück Memorial Reading

Please join us for a memorial reading to celebrate the life and poetry of Louise Glück, co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Stanford Humanities Center.

This event will be hybrid (Zoom or in person) and is open to Stanford affiliates & the general public. Zoom link below. In person seating is limited. Registration is encouraged. Register here

Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://stanford.zoom.us/j/96978590924?pwd=dlhwZUZpZ0Rtclptd2tGb2dSNXZQdz09
Passcode: 743310

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Opening & Closing Remarks

Nicholas Jenkins, Co-Director of Creative Writing Program

Readings

"Song" - Nicholas Jenkins

"A Sharply Worded Silence" - A. Van Jordan, Humanities and Sciences Professor, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Co-Director of Creative Writing Program

"Midnight" - Molly Antopol, Assistant Professor of English

"Crossroads" - Nancy Mohr, Poet

"Vita Nova" - William Brewer, Jones Lecturer

"Aboriginal Landscape" - Jackson Holbert, Jones Lecturer

"October" - Madeleine Cravens, Stegner Fellow in Poetry

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Louise Glück was one of America’s most honored contemporary poets. In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Glück is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of a dozen widely acclaimed books. Stephen Dobyns, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said “no American poet writes better than Louise Glück, perhaps none can lead us so deeply into our own nature.” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.” Her work is noted for its emotional intensity and technical precision; her language, staunchly straightforward, is clear and refined, so much so one does "not see the intervening fathoms.” Glück's considerable accomplishments as a poet are apparent in the volume Poems: 1962-2012 (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), which won the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.

Following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, Glück’s last book was Marigold and Rose: A Fiction (2022), which was hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by The New Yorker and The Guardian (UK) and considered a “small miracle of a book, unlike anything [she] has written.” Other books include Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021), which was recognized as NPR Best Book of the Year, Financial Times Books of the Year, and New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year; A Village Life (2009), which was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Averno (2006), which was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Laurence L. & Thomas Winship /PEN New England Award.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Glück received many honors. In 2001, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement. In 2003, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she held until 2010. Glück was given the Wallace Stevens Award in 2008 for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry,” and in 2015, she received the National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a distinction that is given every six years and is one of American culture’s highest honors. Glück received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Glück was a Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999-2005, and she was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. At Stanford University, Glück was the Mohr Visiting Poet for the Creative Writing Program six times, and she taught workshops for five poetry cohorts in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from 2012-2023. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Glück served on the faculty as the Denning Family Professor in the Arts.