LITERATURE + LECTURES

The 2008/2009 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series presents an evening with two distinguished authors, Ed Hirsch and Charles Simic.

EDWARD HIRSCH (pictured) former UH Creative Writing Program faculty member and current President of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in New York, has written seven collections of poetry, including Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, On Love, and Lay Back The Darkness.

Charles Guenther writes that Hirsch’s are “poems of rare, passionate spiritual energy . . . Hirsch’s imagery is luminous and uplifting.”

He has also published four prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, which The Baltimore Sun called “a lovely book, full of joy and wisdom.”

In Hirsch’s newest collection, Special Orders, he brings together autobiographical pieces to form a picture of his whole life, beginning with his immigrant grandfather.

CHARLES SIMIC, a prolific critic and essayist as well as the former U.S. Poet Laureate, has published more than 60 books here and abroad, including his latest collection of poems, That Little Something, which Publishers Weekly calls “by turns surreal, horrifying, funny, sad, and spoken with (his) friendly bemusement.”

Simic was born in Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1954. He did not speak English until he was 15 years old.

Library Journal calls Simic “a soulmate of Kafka and an anthropologist of the unknowable.”

His other books of poetry include The World Doesn’t End (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), What the Grass Says, Walking the Black Cat (a finalist for the National Book Award), A Wedding in Hell, and Hotel Insomnia.

Booklist says that Simic’s poems “rise from the page like the smoke of the last cigarettes of the damned.”

Presented in association with the Jewish Community Center of Houston.