As a guest of Smith College’s Poetry Center, prized American poet Gerald Stern read from a collection of works that included poems from: “American Sonnets”, “Last Blue: Poems”, and “Galaxy Love”, which will be released in early 2017.
Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, and attended the University of Paris for post-graduate study. Stern’s poetry is influenced by his working-class upbringing and Jewish and Eastern European heritage.
Stern’s many awards and honors include the Bess Hokin Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Bernard F. Conners Award from the Paris Review, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He was Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2000–2002.
This talk was recorded on October 25th, 2016 in the Weinstein Auditorium at Smith College.