October 6, 1995

Contact: Craig D'Ooge (202) 707-9189

---

Poets Karen Alkalay-Gut and Jorie Graham To Read at the Library of Congress

On Thursday evening, October 19, Israeli poet Karen Alkalay- Gut and American poet Jorie Graham will read from their work in the Montpelier Room on the 6th floor of the James Madison Memorial Building. The reading, which is presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund, will begin at 6:45 p.m. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Robert Hass will introduce the poets. Tickets are not required.

Karen Alkalay-Gut was born in London in 1945, during the blitzkrieg, of emigre parents from Danzig, and reared in the United States. She received her Ph.D. degree in English literature from the University of Rochester. In 1972 she moved to Israel, where she has taught at Tel Aviv University since 1977. Her collections of poetry include Making Love: Poems (1980), Mechitza (1986), Alone in the Dawn (1988), Ignorant Armies (1992 and 1994), and Recipes: Love Soup and Other Poems (1994). Her awards and honors include the Arie Dulchin Prize for Literature (1985), the BBC World Service Poetry Award (1990), and the Rachel Prize (1994). Poet Alicia Ostriker writes, "Love and war are two of her chief subjects, though she romanticizes neither....Belief and unbelief go hand in hand for Alkalay-Gut, like love and loss, or despair and hope, or guilt and happiness."

Jorie Graham is the author of Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Region of Unlikeness (1991), Materialism (1993), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Poems, 1974-1994 (1995). With a B.F.A. degree from New York University and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa, Ms. Graham has taught at Murray State University, California State University at Humbolt, the Graduate Poetry Workshop at the Writer's Community in New York, and at Columbia University. She is now a member of the permanent faculty of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her many awards and honors include two Pushcart Prizes, a National Book Critics' Circle Award nomination, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Ingram- Merrill Foundation grant.

# # #

PR 95-136
10/6/95
ISSN 0731-3527