Poets to celebrate Elizabeth Bishop birth centennial Feb. 8

Poet Elizabeth Bishop would have been 100 on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011, and several poets and poetry lovers will mark the occasion with a free reading from her work at 7 p.m. in Prairie Lights Books.

The event will be streamed live and then archived on The University of Iowa's Writing University web site.

Readers will include UI Writers' Workshop faculty members James Galvin, Geoffrey Nutter, and Emily Wilson; Robyn Schiff, UI director of undergraduate creative writing; Prairie Lights' Jan Weissmiller, Rob Schlegel, and Paul Ingram; Washington poet Carol Light; and workshop alumna Dora Malech.

An increasingly celebrated force in contemporary literature, Bishop was U.S. poet laureate from 1949–59, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and two Guggenheim fellowships. She was awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets in 1964 and served as a chancellor for the organization from 1966 to 1979. In the last decade of her life she taught at the University of Washington, Harvard University, New York University, and MIT.

Her birth centennial is also the occasion of the publication of two definitive collections of her work, Poems and Prose.

Other upcoming readings:

• Meghan Daum, a guest of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, will read from Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 9, in Prairie Lights Books.
• John Reimringer will read from Vestments, his new novel, at 7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 10, in Prairie Lights Books.
• University of Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty members James Galvin and Peter Orner will present a free reading at 8 p.m., Friday, Feb. 11, in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of Dey House.

prepared by University Relations