Poet Laureate, Pulitzer-Prize Winner Highlight Beall Poetry Festival

WACO, Texas -- Baylor University's third annual Beall Poetry Festival will be held
Feb. 26-28, with several events featuring two of the United States' most distinguished poets, Mark Strand and Louise Glück, and an influential poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff. All events associated with the festival, which are free and open to the public, will be held in the Meadows Recital Hall of the Glennis McCrary Music Building on the Baylor campus.
On Wednesday, Feb. 26, Strand will open the three-day festival by reading a selection of his poems at 7:30 p.m. On Thursday, Feb. 27, Glück will informally discuss her work at
3:30 p.m. Later that same day, at 7:30 p.m., Perloff will deliver the Virginia Beall Ball Lecture in Contemporary Poetry, with an awards presentation for winners in the annual Student Literary Contest to follow immediately. On Friday, Feb. 28, Strand will informally discuss his work at 3:30 p.m., and Glück will close the festival with a reading of her poems at 7:30 p.m.
The poets and poetry critic participating in the festival have enjoyed long, highly recognized careers. From 1990-91, Mark Strand served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the U.S. Library of Congress, one of the art's most prestigious appointments. He is the author of seven books of poetry, the first five of which are collected in his Selected Poems (1980). His most recent volume is Dark Harbor (1993). Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934. As a child and teenager, he lived in Halifax, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, in addition to cities in Columbia, Peru, and Mexico. He earned degrees from Antioch College, Yale University and the University of Iowa. Having previously taught at such institutions as Princeton University and the University of Utah, he currently serves as the Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and frequently reads at universities across the country.
Strand won Yale University's highly coveted Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1993. In addition, he has been awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets (1974), National Institute of Arts and Letters and American Academy awards in literature (1975),
and the biennial Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress (1992).
Strand has received grants or fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation (1960-61), the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1966), the National Endowment for the Arts (1967-68, 1978-79, and 1986-87), the Rockefeller Foundation (1968-69), the Guggenheim Foundation (1975-76), the Academy of American Poets (1979), and the MacArthur Foundation (1987). He also has produced works of fiction, children's literature, and art criticism and has translated work by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. In addition, he has edited several anthologies of poetry, including The Best American Poetry 1991.
Louise Glück (pronounced "Glick") won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for her book of poems The Wild Iris. She is the author of seven books of poetry, four of which are collected in The First Four Books of Poems (1995). Her most recent volume is Meadowlands (1996). She was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1962 and Columbia University from 1963-68. Having previously taught at such institutions as Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of Iowa, and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), she currently serves as senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., and frequently reads at universities across the country.
Glück's book of poems The Triumph of Achilles (1985) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award for Poetry, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award. She also has been awarded the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine (1971), the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award (1993), and the biennial Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress (1992). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1990 Glück delivered the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard University. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation (1968-69), the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-89, 1979-80, 1969-70), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1987-88, 1975-76). Glück also has authored a collection of essays, titled Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the 1995 P.E.N./Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and has served as editor of The Best American Poetry 1993.
Marjorie Perloff is the author of nine books of literary criticism, including her most recent work Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996). She

earned degrees from Barnard College and Catholic University of America. Having taught at such
institutions as the University of Maryland and the University of Southern California, she currently serves at the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University.
Perloff has written widely on modern and postmodern poetry and poetics, including book-length studies of W. B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara. In addition to her books, she has published more than 250 essays and book reviews during the last 30 years and currently sits on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, American Poetry Review, Sulfur, the Wallace Stevens Journal, and Genre among other journals. In addition, she is the editor of the contemporary section of the Columbia Literary History of the United States. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has served on the executive council of the Modern Language Association (MLA), on the advisory board of the PMLA, and as president of the American Comparative Literature Association from 1993-95.
The Beall Poetry Festival is supported by the John A. and DeLouise McClelland Beall Endowed Fund, which was established in 1994 with an initial gift of more than $250,000 and with continuing generosity since by Mrs. Virginia B. Ball of Muncie, Ind., to honor her parents and to encourage the writing and appreciation of poetry. Mrs. Ball, a Baylor graduate, is a previous donor to Baylor. She established the Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities in 1982 and, in a separate gift, provided funds for the nationally recognized Academy of American Poets Award, given annually to a Baylor student for an original work.
For more information, contact Baylor's Department of English at (817) 755-1768. In addition, a web site for the 1997 Beall Poetry Festival can be accessed at the following address: https://www.baylor.edu/~PR/Beall/.