Poet Rosanna Warren will deliver the inaugural Mark Strand Memorial Reading on Wednesday, February 7, 2018, at 4pm at the Beinecke Library. This event is free and open to all.

Poet and scholar Rosanna Warren, ’76, is the author of books of prose and poetry including Departure, Ghost in a Red Hat, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, and The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field.  She has received prizes and grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. Since 2012 she has been the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.  She has strong ties to the Beinecke Library which is the home of the literary archives of both her parents, writers Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark.

The Strand Memorial Readings are endowed by Dr. Jeffrey V. Ravetch ’73. As a Yale undergraduate double majoring in English and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Dr. Ravetch interacted with the Beinecke Library collections, developing a life-long passion for 20th Century American poetry. Throughout his career in medical research, Dr. Ravetch has maintained his interest in American poetry and has become an avid collector of books in this field.  

Dr. Ravetch’s gift honors his friend and fellow Yale graduate, poet and visual artist Mark Strand ’59 BFA. Strand was the author of numerous books and poetry collections including Blizzard of One, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Dark Harbor, The Story of Our Lives, and Reasons for Moving among many others. His many honors include Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bobbit Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Shortly before he passed away in 2014, Mark Strand gave a reading at Beinecke Library, a recording of which can be found on the Library’s website: Mark Strand Reading, 11/2014.

A temporary exhibition of materials from Dr. Ravetch’s extraordinary collection of Mark Strand’s work will be on view; Dr. Ravetch donated his collection to the Beinecke in 2017.

The Beinecke Library is a national center for the living art of American poetry. For more information about poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library, visit us online: Poetry at Beinecke Library.