Rosanna Warren

LEADING AMERICAN POET, DAUGHTER OF ROBERT PENN WARREN, TO READ FROM NEW COLLECTION

NYS Writers Institute, April 12, 2011
4:15 p.m. Seminar | Standish Room, Science Library
8:00 p.m. Reading | Campus Center, Room 375, Uptown Campus

CALENDAR LISTING:
Rosanna Warren, leading American poet, Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), a work that contemplates “wreckage and sorrow” in daily life and world events, Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 8:00 p.m. in Campus Center Room 375 on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day the author will offer an informal seminar at 4:15 p.m. in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the uptown campus. The events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, and are free and open to the public.

"I didn't set out to write poems. . .but the poems came. They were sometimes appearing in my sketch book. . ." (3:37)

PROFILE
Rosanna Warren is the author most recently of Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), a collection of poems that “contemplate wreckage and sorrow” in family life, Hurricane Katrina, the Civil War, and the Trojan War. To a large extent, the collection represents a conscious effort to internalize and articulate the pain experienced by other people, both real and imagined. Warren asserts in one poem, “as long as the danger lived outside / me I couldn’t write it.”

Critic Harold Bloom has called Warren, “An important poet . . . beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets.” The late poet Anthony Hecht said “Rosanna Warren lives in our tarnished, everyday, ramshackle world of loss, anguish, and sacrifice, but she inhabits almost as vividly a realm of classic purity; and in some of her best, most moving poems she dwells in both regions at once, and within, as it seems, the same breath.”

Rosanna Warren is the winner of the Lavan Younger Poets Prize, the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Witter Bynner Prize, and the Poetry Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among numerous other honors.

In 2008, Warren published Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, a unique work that is part autobiography, part literary criticism. The Publishers Weekly reviewer said that her criticism “shines, much like her verse, because of her ability to make the past and present connect,” adding that “Warren is a matchless guide to her favorite major poets.”

Warren received an L. A. Times Book Award nomination for her 2003 collection, Departure, about explorations of loss and “difficult love” in relationships between mother and daughter, wife and husband, artist and muse, and woman and demon-lover. The Library Journal reviewer praised the book for “stunningly written explorations of death, the passage of time, loss, and impermanence.”
Other poetry collections include Stained Glass (1993), Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), and Snow Day (1981). With Stephen Scully, Warren authored an English translation of Euripedes’ play, “The Suppliant Women” (1995). She also edited the essay collection, The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (1989).

Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was the New York Times Resident in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. Currently the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, she also serves as contributing editor of Seneca Review and poetry editor of Daedalus.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.