Paul Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and renowned author of more than 30 books, will offer a public poetry reading of his recent works at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, November 13 at Fairfield University. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the Charles F. Dolan School of Business Dining Room. It is sponsored by Fairfield's Irish Studies Program, the Humanities Institute of the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and the MFA in Creative Writing.

"Like W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney before him, Muldoon conveys the dire complexities of Irish life in times of crisis while also revealing the mind-teasing, soul-stirring powers of language," said Nels Pearson, Ph.D., associate professor of English. "His place as one of the twentieth century's most important poets is already secure, and will be so for as long as poetry is studied. We are honored and delighted to have him visit us."

Described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War," Paul Muldoon was raised in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1986 he has lived in the United States, where he is now the Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University. In 2007 he was appointed poetry editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004, he was professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary fellow of Hertford College.

Muldoon's main collections include "New Weather" (1973), "Why Brownlee Left" (1980), "Hay" (1998), "Moy Sand and Gravel" (2002) and "Maggot" (2010).

A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was given the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry.

Muldoon has received near-unanimous praise for his work over the last 40 years. His latest collection, "Maggot," was named to several best books of the year lists.

"The most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, he writes poems like no one else," wrote Nick Laird in The New York Review of Books . Adam Newey of The Guardian pronounced it "an intellectual fairground ride, with daring swoops and hairpin turns of thought."

For more information on this event, contact Elizabeth Hastings, ehastings@fairfield.edu or (203) 254-4000, ext. 2688.

Posted On: 10-23-2013 11:10 AM

Volume: 46 Number: 85