50/100: CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS AND ORGANIZATIONS
CONTENTS
1. Plutzik Series Readers, 2011-12
2. Musical Composers
3. Partnering Organizations
PLUTZIK SERIES READERS, 2011-12
Yusef Komunyakaa, October 13, 2011
Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana in 1947, where he was raised during the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, Yusef Komunyakaa served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent, and as managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam War, earning him a Bronze Star. He first received wide recognition as a poet following the 1984 publication of Copacetic, a collection of poems built from colloquial speech which demonstrated his incorporation of jazz influences. He followed the book with two others: I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize and has been cited by poets such as William Matthews and Robert Hass as being among the best writing on the war in Vietnam.
Since then, he has published several books of poems, including most recently The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1995. Komunyakaa is the recipient of the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. He lives in New York City where he is currently Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.
Jennifer Grotz, James Longenbach, Stephen Schottenfeld, and Joanna Scott, October 22, 2011
Jennifer Grotz is the author of The Needle (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) and Cusp (2003), winner of the Bakeless Prize and the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Book Award. Her poems, essays, reviews, and translations appear widely in journals and anthologies. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
James Longenbach is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Iron Key (W. W. Norton) and Draft of a Letter (Chicago). He also writes about poetry, and his two most recent books of prose are The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf) and The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago). His poems and reviews appear frequently in such magazines as The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
Stephen Schottenfeld has completed a story collection, Miss Ellen Jameson Is Not Deceased, and is currently writing a novel set in Memphis. His stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and other literary magazines, and have garnered a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant and special mentions in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies.
Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels, including Follow Me, Liberation, Tourmaline, Make Believe, The Manikin, and Arrogance, and two collections of short fiction, Various Antidotes and Everybody Loves Somebody. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harpers, Esquire, Conjunctions, Black Clock, Subtropics, and other journals. She has reviewed for The New York Times, The Nation, and The Los Angeles Times. Her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner, and the LA Times Book Award. Awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ambassador Book Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
Eavan Boland, November 10, 2011
Eavan Boland, professor and poet, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated in London, New York, and Dublin. She is Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for the Director of Creative Writing at Stanford. Her books of poetry include Against Love Poetry, which was a New York Times notable book of 2001; The Lost Land; An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987; In a Time of Violence; Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990; and most recently, in 2008, New Collected Poems.
Christopher Ricks, November 30, 2011
Christopher Ricks is Professor of the Humanities, and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University, having previously taught at Oxford, Bristol, and Cambridge. He was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 2004-2009. His talk on “T. S. Eliot and the Auditory Imagination” is cognate with his books T. S. Eliot and Prejudice; Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot; and True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the sign of Eliot and Pound. He edited T. S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare, and (with Jim McCue) is co-editing The Poems of T. S. Eliot, a complete critical edition with full textual and contextual notes.
Susan Stewart, March 5, 2012
Susan Stewart is a poet and critic who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 2003 collection, Columbarium. She has also written three other collections of poetry, as well as several works of art and literary criticism. Stewart is currently professor of English at Princeton University, where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics. She was elected a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets in 2005.
U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, April 12, 2012
Philip Levine won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1995 as well as other prestigious awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first American Book Award for Poetry. He also won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize for Poetry, the Frank O’Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. For two years, Levine served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught for many years at California State University, Fresno, and has served as Distinguished Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing Program at New York University. In 2000, Levine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He was elected United States Poet Laureate in 2011.
Rosanna Warren, April 24, 2012
Rosanna Warren, the daughter of former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren, is currently the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and a University Professor at Boston University. She has published two poetry collections, one of which won the Lamont Poetry Prize. She is also the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency. In 2008-09, Warren was a fellow of the Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
MUSICAL COMPOSERS
Recordings of the works described below can be heard here.
Samuel Adler, Canto V
Samuel Adler’s Canto V, featuring text from poems in Hyam Plutzik’s Apples from Shinar, was premiered in 1969 at the dedication of the Interfaith Chapel at the University of Rochester. Samuel Adler, professor emeritus at the Eastman School of Music, is the composer of over 400 published works, including 5 operas, 6 symphonies, 12 concerti, 9 string quartets, 5 oratorios, and many other orchestral, band, chamber, and choral works and songs. Adler has been awarded many prizes, including a 1990 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Charles Ives Award, the Lillian Fairchild Award, and a Special Citation from the American Foundation of Music Clubs.
Jeffery L. Briggs, Two Poems of Hyam Plutzik
Jeffery L. Briggs’ Two Poems of Hyam Plutzik is a piece for orchestra and narrator based on “An Equation” from his collection Aspects of Proteus and “Jim Desterland” from Apples from Shinar. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and Memphis University, and completed a Doctor of Music Arts degree at the University of Illinois. He developed an interest in new media, collaborating with game designer Sid Meier and composing soundtracks for computer games through his own company, Firaxis Games, notably the music for Civilization IV. Briggs’s Celebration for Orchestra had its world premiere in 2009 with The Westfield Symphony, led by David Wroe. Later that year, The Watcom Symphony, led by Dr. Roger Briggs, premiered his Washington’s Artillery.
Roger Briggs, An Equation
Roger Briggs’ music is consistently praised as some of the most compelling, imaginative, and communicative music written in recent times. Reviewers stress the music’s “rare power of communication” using words and phrases like: “delicate, haunting, trance-inducing”; “intrinsic appeal to the senses”; “brilliant and expansive”; “music that coaxes the imagination to unconscious imagery”; “immersion in atmosphere and color’. His music is being performed in the U.S., Europe and South America by ensembles like the London Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Symphony, the Seattle Symphony and others. His chamber works are performed by respected groups like the Da Capo Chamber Players, the New Performance Group, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Fear No Music, Zephyr, Third Angle and the Buffalo New Music Ensemble. He has received numerous commissions, grants, awards, and prizes for his work.
Robert S. Cohen, Sprig of Lilac and Of Eternity Considered as a Closed System
Robert S. Cohen has composed settings for several of Hyam Plutzik’s works: an a cappella choral setting for his signature poem Sprig of Lilac (2003) and Of Eternity Considered as a Closed System (2006), a song cycle for chorus and chamber orchestra based on seven of Plutzik’s lyrics. “Sprig of Lilac” was premiered by St. Martin’s Chamber Choir in Denver. Of Eternity Considered as a Closed System was premiered in 2007 by the Westfield Symphony and Pro Arte Chorale at Carnegie Hall. It had its European premiere in 2008 by the Bulgarian National Opera chorus and orchestra. Cohen has won many awards and commissions, including a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, an American Music Center grant, a Meet the Composer Award, and several grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. He was the winner of the 2008 New York Composer’s Circle Award.
Douglas Lowry, On Hearing that My Poems Were Being Studied in a Distant Place
PARTNERING ORGANIZATIONS
The Betsy Hotel, Miami Beach, FL
In addition to being a highly rated leisure destination, The Betsy Hotel in South Beach, Florida is a philanthropic organization with a strong presence in the Miami arts community and an emphasis on poetry. In April 2012 the Betsy will host the University of Wynwood’s third annual O, Miami festival, in conjunction with the 50/100 and National Poetry Month. | The Betsy Hotel website
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester
This Department, home of the Hyam Plutzik Library for Contemporary Writing, is holding two exhibitions during the 50/100: Hyam Plutzik: Poet, featuring items from the Hyam Plutzik Archive (Oct. 2011-Jan. 2012); and a second exhibit opening in Fall 2012 that will showcase the history of the Plutzik Reading Series. | More information | RBSC website
Society for Jewish American and Holocaust Literature (JAHLIT)
This society of literary scholars was founded by Gloria Cronin, Professor of English at Brigham Young University. For the last several years, JAHLIT has held its annual symposium at The Betsy Hotel; the November 2011 Symposium included a panel on the work of Hyam Plutzik, in honor of the poet’s centennial. | JAHLIT website
University of Wynwood
The University of Wynwood is a literary non-profit organization that curates events and projects for the advancement of contemporary literature in Miami. One of U. Wynwood’s primary initiatives, the poetry festival O, Miami (April 2012), will be partially sponsored this year by the Betsy Hotel. | University of Wynwood website