CALENDAR LISTING:
The Three Blue Cats jazz band will present a musical setting for a reading by award-winning poet F. D. Reeve, father of late Superman actor and disability activist Christopher Reeve, on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 7:30 p.m. [Note change to earlier start time to avoid conflict with televised Presidential debate] in Page Hall on the University at Albany’s downtown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m. Reeve will present an informal seminar in Science Library 340 on the uptown campus. The events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and are free and open to the public.

PROFILE
The Three Blue Cats jazz band will present a setting of live jazz improvisation for a reading by award-winning poet F. D. Reeve from his new poetry volume, “The Blue Cat Walks the Earth” (2008). The book is a sequel to the widely-admired collections, “The Blue Cat” (1972) and “The Return of the Blue Cat” (2005). The new volume presents twenty-four poems ranging from the sassy and saucy to the passionate, the profoundly serious, and the elegiac.

A novelist, poet, critic, and noted translator of Russian literature, the 80-year-old Reeve is a two-time winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, as well as the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Golden Rose Award of the New England Poetry Society, the May Sarton Award and the Allen Tate Award. He is a Professor Emeritus of Letters at Wesleyan University where he taught for forty years.

Other recent books include the novel, “My Sister Life” (2005), and the poetry collection, “The Toy Soldier and Other Poems” (2007). Writing in the “Contemporary Poetry Review,” John Drexel said of “Toy Soldier,”  “F.D. Reeve is one of the finest, most underappreciated poets now at work in this country. For thirty-some-odd years he has been producing work of stunning power and relevance, work that reminds one all at once of the prophetic voice of Yeats, the piercing, crystalline sensibilities of Stevens, and the wild winds and fur pelts of a Siberian shaman.”

Reeve has published ten volumes of poetry, seven books of fiction, twelve books of translations, three books of literary criticism, four libretti, and countless uncollected essays, articles, stories, poems, reviews, and translations in journals across the country  His work has appeared in the “Atlantic,” “American Scholar,” “New Yorker,” “New York Times Book Review,” “New Criterion,” “Times Literary Supplement,” “Washington Post Book World,” “Antioch Review,” “Sewanee Review,” and UAlbany’s own “Little Magazine.”

Outside the literary community, Reeve is better known as the father of the late Superman actor and disability activist, Christopher Reeve.